Kindle Scout (in the beginning)
- Jennifer Rae
- Mar 8, 2016
- 5 min read
I know this was promised for Sunday, but I had a busy day with editing Analogue, so I never got around to it. Finally, I have some time to reflect on my first week of the Kindle Scout program.
Firstly, I think I need to say just one thing about the program in general. I do not regret it. I know it might seem that I do, and at times it was difficult to deal with, but there is no regret. Kindle Scout appears to have mixed reviews out there. Until you start looking a little deeper and comparing the results.
Many other people who had taken to the Scout programme have blogged about the experience, and I can tell you that there are zero blogs with a successful campaign who regret it. Perhaps they will come later. Afterall, Scout is only a few years old, and it might take time before authors decide they actually could have made it alone.
So if you were successful, then Scout is great and worth it. If you fail, and there are many blogs where people tell you that they worked hard and got zero from Amazon to show for it. Unfortunately, that is the nature of the beast, and for every book that is published, a dozen is not. We all play against those odds.
So onto the review of the first week. The first four days were great. I woke up trending, and when I didn't it was easy to tweak a few well times tweets or bug a couple of random people, and there I was trending again. Trending is the most important thing for the life of the campaign, and understandably it is hard to stay there. Everyone is fighting for a spot. Day five was a low point with only one hour of trending. With 195 views and zero trend hours, I cried.
The methods for getting my link out to the masses were varied. These are my opinions on them. Facebook ads: these were tricky to set up because they have a rule where you can't have more than 10% text on your images. Once you worked out that little bit of math, it was all right. Percentage of clicks were not that high, only 23% on my best day.
Twitter Ads: far less rigid with their policy. Reach was further and higher success rate. At my peak, 71%. Quizzes: I created two quizzes. Which character from Extol of Agnatic Dreams are you? and How long would you survive Braykith? Neither were particularly amazing in getting people to visit the website, but I thought they were cute and unexpected advertising techniques.
Messages: this was the most direct way. I just went around messaging and contacting every person I knew and gave them the link directly.
Twitter and Facebook posts: obviously posting every day, at least twice a day, the direct link in messages. Fictional Casting: blogs dedicated to the physical look of the characters, giving them real world faces and small descriptions in the hopes of drumming up interest.
I think I used a good mix of traditional and unique advertising techniques in the hopes of getting enough votes to trend. Of course, the conventional methods seemed to be more efficient, but I still enjoyed making the more creative ones and like to think they did get some attention.
Now that it has been a week I have been able to observe and make decisions on the information you do get from Kindle Scout. You don't get a lot. Total hours trended, the number of views, and where they came from. I didn't bother looking too closely into it until last night. I was checking the number of look-ins my personal website was getting and the number this week had increased from last week and the week before.
I can only attribute this to the Kindle Scout program. It might not seem like much, but this is my theory on it. Fo the past few days I have not been trending on Kindle Scout. I needed to remind myself that people might still be nominating. However, I am not receiving enough to hit that exclusive list of twenty books. I do believe people are nominating me because they are clicking my website.
I think there is a direct link between them liking what they see, and want to know more. After all, that is how advertising works, and so I just applied that same theory to my data. It might not be true, but it seems very likely. I had 100 click throughs today. That is a lot more than I ever managed to get before. 6th Feb (before I joined Scout) I had a single click through. The first day on Kindle Scout I had 8. And they have increased since then.
Why would people click the website, but not nominate? I am clinging to this hope so please, you don't need to ruin my little fantasy lol
I do have one major drawback on Kindle Scout, something that I do not understand. Before I entered the program, they religiously debuted only 3-5 books a day. Like clockwork, at midnight their time (which was 4 pm for me), they would release new works. Which is fine and to be expected, after all, I was hoping to be one of those new releases. However, when they released my book, I came out with nine other titles. That was a jump up from the usual.
Then they released nothing for a couple of days, and so I thought that maybe it was because it was over the weekend and maybe they do this every Friday. But then on the Monday their time they released 19 new books. When a new book is released, those are their best chance for trending because that is when they contact every person they know for nominations. Only twenty books get to trend that day. With 19 new releases, it was tiring trying to stay up there.
Since my release, the number of books being released daily has changed, and it seems now there is no rhyme or reason to it. They are just releasing all the books or none of the books. There have been no new releases for three days now. Who knows how many I will need to fight against tomorrow?
The problem is, there is no magic number for the trending status. It goes to whoever has secured the most nominations. The top twenty of the day (which of course updates several times a day) get to trend. If the top twenty only have five votes, then you need six. The problem is, the top twenty might have a thousand votes, and I can never compete with that.
Chek out my campaign. I have twenty days to go. I wish it was over so Kindle Scout could just accept, or reject, me.
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