KDP Select is a program that you enter your eBook into for 90 days at a time.
Note: The following is an excerpt from Amazon Kindle eBook Marketing and Promotion for Self-publishing Beginners.
While in the program, your eBook benefits in the following ways:
- Generate 70% royalties instead of 35% royalties in several countries, including Japan, Indio, Brazil and Mexico. This isn’t very important to my book marketing plan.
- Your eBook gets entered into Kindle Unlimited in the U.S. and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) in the U.S, U.K., Germany, France, and Japan. As a result, you earn additional revenue by loaning your eBook to Amazon readers. This may sound like no big deal, but we generate fully 50% of our Amazon revenue from loaning books. This benefit will provide you with a huge revenue increase should you choose to enter the Kindle Select program.
- You get to promote your eBook on Amazon. During your 90-day enrollment period, you have the choice of running five days of free promotions or 13 days of countdown deal. During the countdown deal, your book sells for a reduced price on Amazon for a number of days before the price increments to the next higher value. For example, you can offer your book for $0.99 for a number of days before the price increases to $1.99 and eventually arrives back at its original price. And all the while, Amazon displays the original price crossed out and the markdown price along with the number of days the price is available. This provides a great incentive for readers to buy your eBook now!
While the first option is far less than exciting, the second two options are huge!
So, why wouldn’t you always just automatically enter the KDP Select program? The answer is that there’s a heavy price to pay for entry:
Exclusivity!
To enter your eBook into the KDP Select program, you must agree to publish your eBook exclusively on Amazon. No Smashwords, no Apple. That’s a lot of revenue to walk away from. However, my experience has shown that the added revenue derived from loaning and promoting my eBook on Amazon far exceeds the revenue I was generating by self-publishing my eBook anywhere else but Amazon.
This book series assumes you will enter your eBook into the KDP Select program and therefore provides no information on self-publishing anywhere but Amazon. Should you choose to publish your eBook everywhere, I recommend publishing through Smashwords to save yourself the time and bother involved in publishing individually everywhere.
