Free, free, free, free.
On August 12th, 2017, The Devil’s Playbook will be one year old.
With that in mind, and otherwise flat sales for the past two months, I decided to add the novel to Kindle Select on Tuesday. I’m not really sure why I hadn’t taken that step previously, but thought I would give it a whirl. As part of Kindle Select, the novel is now available to subscribers of the Kindle Unlimited service, who for a monthly payment receive access to all titles submitted to Kindle Select at no extra charge. Think Netflix, but for books.
Authors can only submit for Kindle Select providing their e-book is sold exclusively on Amazon. My novel is, so that’s fine. Even the paperback is produced by CreateSpace, an Amazon company, so I’m fine there, too. It is very useful for indie authors who have used Amazon’s services to self-publish. Once they are members of Kindle Select, authors get paid from a ‘global fund’ that Amazon put aside each month, based on an amount per page read. One 2017 article I skimmed suggested that it works out at about 0.5 cents per page. this means that The Devil’s Playbook, at just over 300 pages, would get me $1.50 per read. That’s a significant improvement on the $0.00 I’ve been getting for the last couple of months.
Being based in the UK, I’ve not really heard of many friends that are subscribed to Kindle Unlimited, so the local impact will be limited. I intend to use FB, Twitter and Instagram — my go-to three for social media promotions — to try and gauge this and otherwise promote the service.
First of all, however, I have opted for a second benefit of being a Kindle Select member: free promotions.
Every month, members of Kindle Select can promote their title as a free e-book on Kindle for a five day period. No revenue will be earned doing this, and it is likely that no one will read the Kindle Unlimited version when they can own a full copy for free. But with literally nothing to lose when it comes to revenue, this can work very well to extend the audience for an author in my position.
My current free promotion started on Wednesday 26th July, and finishes on Sunday 30th July. I’m closing in on the end of day three right now, and have been using social media to advertise that the novel is now free, for a limited time. I’ve hugely stepped up my Tweet efforts, for instance, sending over 60 tweets about this in the last three days. This is nothing compared to the more prolific Tweeters out there, but is quite the increase for me.
As a result of the promotional efforts, over 45 copies have now been given away. These are still not stellar figures, but — again — a marked increase on the baseline of zero. And it’s been fun watching the result. Amazon tracks sales against historical performance and peers in each book category. Over the last few days I’ve managed to get The Devil’s Playbook up to rank #3 for free fantasy e-books on the UK Amazon store. It’s dropped back to #6 at the time of writing, but a screenshot was happily captured at the time, for posterity.

Hopefully the new readers will help increase word-of-mouth knowledge about The Devil’s Playbook, along with generating new feedback and reviews on my Amazon and Goodreads pages. Being free copies, however, it is likely that not all will be read. And of those read, not all will be enjoyed. And of those enjoyed, not all readers will offer up reviews. Still, anything is better than nothing, so I am hopeful.
Interestingly, my otherwise-stalled day job recently required that I take up an additional duty — reviewing our marketing efforts for compliance against advertising rules. This has made for quite a helpful insight when self-promoting, and is one of the few areas I’m actually enjoying at work right now. A very timely string added to my bow, indeed.
The Devil’s Playbook is free in the Kindle Store until Sunday 30th June. UK store page here, and US store page here. The Devil’s Playbook is also available in other regional Amazon stores.
Website: www.anthonylesueur.com
Instagram / Twitter: @fyrryl
