Amazon KDP Select users: How’d that work out for ya?

Crunch time is comin’. I can feel it. Publicación. The necessary steps are in view, and I’m forging ahead with a few things that ought to make the process smoother in the fall, when I pull the trig on Yesterday Road.

But something that keeps popping up in my research is this KDP Select animal. At this point in my still-innocent mind, the advantages of being able to give my book away for free for five out of 90 days seem slight, though I might well be missing something.

Yes, I know that being in KDP Select puts your book into certain pools that might make it easier to find. There appear to be plusses in terms of the lending program. The potential disadvantage of missing out on other sales outlets for 90 days seems fairly weak, since Amazon is clearly the main event. You can always plop your book onto Smashwords after the Select period ends.

This post from duolit goes into the nits and grits of the program, and a number of the commenters claim terrific results from it.

To you self-pubbers out there: Have you used KDP Select? How’d it go for you? Do you recommend it? You think it’ll work for literary fiction (as if anything will)?

Tell all!

UPDATE: This post at Jane Friedman’s blog is very informative, including these observations from the hosts of the Self-Publishing Podcast: “The market is saturated. There are too many authors screaming for the same six seconds of spotlight. Free isn’t converting to paid like it once was, and worse, authors are creating a culture of readers who are being nurtured away from paying. Those authors who can still be served best by KDP Select are the ones with smart funnels and using free promotion to direct readers toward other paid titles.”

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