“Kindle Countdown Deals” are actually pretty cool. In the past Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) only offered free promotions. You’d get 5 days for every 3 month enrollment period. When you did this, you royalties went to zero, but you got great promotion via Amazon for using it. The hope was after the promotion so many people would have downloaded your book that they recommend it to others and they come in later and purchase it. For the record, this has not gone away.
Amazon’s new and additional approach allows you to specify a time range, number of price adjustments over that time range, and starting price. Then, it determines how many days (or hours) during your promotion to charge an adjusted price based on starting price and number of desired adjustments. It really does all the work. You get a very clear summary before saying “create this promotion” for the exact dates and resulting prices.
What’s great about this is even if your discounted price goes below the magic $2.99 number your royalty won’t be impacted by it. If you follow all the KDP rules and have a price point above $2.99 you can earn a 70% royalty. Otherwise, you get 35%.
They also have a new section of their website (http://amazon.com/kindlecountdowndeals) to promote your book! Just because this exists it will get used, which means your book has a higher probability of being seen (and hopefully purchased by your target market).
There’s one qualifier to being able to use this. Your price has to be stable for at least 30 days before you can use the countdown. In my case, I just did a FREE promotion. So I can’t use my new promotion until December! You also have to end your promotion 16 days before the end of your KDP enrollment period.
I nearly forgot to mention the real-time performance monitoring system. They’ve integrated it into the reports that are already out there.
Overall, this is AMAZING and I can’t wait to see the sales results. For more information check out: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A3288N75MH14B8