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Kindle Digital Publishing Select

I have six books enrolled in the Kindle Digital Publishing Select Program. For those that don't know, the KDP Select Program requires that the books be offered exclusively on Amazon over a 90 day, renewable period, and that the books be available for free loan to Kindle users who belong to the Amazon Prime program.

For less than $80 a year a membership in the Amazon Prime program gets you three major benefits:

  1. Free two day shipping for Prime eligible items.
  2. Free instant streaming videos from the Prime library.
  3. Ability to borrow KDP select books.
What does the author get in return for allowing his book to be borrowed for free on the KDP Select program? Well, if the book is borrowed, then the author shares in a pool of money allocated for that month for the book loans. Sometimes these loan fees are as good as the royalty on a sale, sometimes not. A second advantage is a method to promote the book. The promotion method provides you with 5 days during the 90 day period where you can give away free copies of your book. You do this in hope of generating traffic and in getting reviews to stimulate sales for the free book once the give-way is over or for others in a series.

Once the 90 days expires, you can renew manually or automatically and get five more promotion days. Getting publicity for your give-away is up to you, something I have no talent for.

The KDP Select period for all my Kindle books expire in April. Between now and then, I plan to use up all my remaining promotion days and give away copies of each KDP book I have on Amazon. However, I will not be renewing any of my books in the KDP Select program. Instead, I will switch to the usual KDP program for these books on Amazon, and I'm going to publish all six books in new venues such as Barnes and Noble, Kobo, etc.

My current Work In Progress (WIP) is the fictional tale of one of Charlemagne's paladins who ends up in Britain as a free lance knight in approximately 816AD, a few years after Charlemage's death. Although, I've researched the period, I've decided to take liberties by introducing scientific advances some of which were discovered in the early medieval period in some places but likely were not known in Britain. In some cases, I've extended that knowledge to a technology not available in the middle ages. Hence, I've created an alternate history with a science fiction tinge. I'm about 30,000 words in and expect the story to run more than 100,000 words.

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