Kindle Countdown Deals: A Taster

At the start of November 2013 Amazon introduced The Kindle Countdown Deal, and I am sure I'm not alone in doing a little dance at the prospect of getting more exposure for my titles without actually having to give them away.  At a quick glance the idea is a good one: the price of the book is reduced and then over a period of time works its way back by increments to its original price.  A countdown clock sits next to your book on the product page so that potential customers can see exactly how long they have left to buy  the book, before the price goes up.

There are other benefits, but for me the biggest draw was the separate page listing all the deals, and indeed Amazon use this as a selling point to authors and publishers.  In Amazon's words:

 There's a dedicated website: Customers can easily browse active; Kindle Countdown Deals at www.amazon.com/kindlecountdowndeals, providing yet another way for books to be discovered. 



After long and careful consideration, I enrolled my new book, If Only Slugs Were Edible for the period 8th-10th November in the UK only; currently only the .co.uk and .com territories are included in the programme. Slugs has done well since release on .com but has done very little in the UK; with a dedicated website and only one or two pages of books in my genre, this seemed like the ideal way to get the book into the rankings.  To gain visibility.

For various reasons, mostly down to bad planning and being doped up the eyeballs again thanks to a still very troublesome dislocated knee, I failed to do any promotion for the start on Friday and, quite rightly, the book didn't sell.  First thing on Saturday I began touting my wares and a few sales resulted.  Sadly the book was yet to appear on the dedicated website so was lost amongst the many, but it was at least displaying the countdown clock, should anybody happen to stumble across it.

As it was still not listed on the dedicated website by the end of the day, and we were then getting on for two thirds of the way through the promo, I dropped a query to Amazon requesting clarification.  A reply came back on Sunday morning confirming that the deal was running and implying that if I couldn't see it, then it was probably because I was looking in the wrong place.  Not quite answering my question, then.

Having carefully gone through every page of the Kindle Countdown Deals dedicated website for the UK, I was pretty certain that Slugs was not there.  I replied to that fact, but meanwhile had anyway achieved my goal of getting into the rankings for the Travel>Continental Europe>France category.

Thanks to family, friends and members and readers of the Kindle Users Forum, Slugs peaked at  6th in that category.

And, slightly oddly topped the rankings for Celebrated Gardens>Gardens Around the World.  Anyone visiting our grassy patch would be appalled!

Monday morning, promotion and excitement over, a further clarification email arrived from Amazon

Please note that while some books are featured on the Kindle Countdown Deals page, not all books are.This page has a range of automated merchandising campaigns to help customers discover deals based on attributes including genre, most popular, and recommendations.

Yes, it is obvious, but once again visibility only really comes once you already have some visibility.

Overall, I'm pleased with the promotion so far, the real success can only be judged by future sales.  But I do feel that the fanfare surrounding the dedicated website is a little disingenuous and we could all do with more transparency on the part of Amazon.