Since summer 2012, I've published three Kindle books on Amazon; they make enough to pay for a meal out once or twice a month. In October 2013, I had, by far, my best month ever, with 88 sales. This diary collects what I've learned about selling Kindle books.
For reference, here are the two books I'll discuss (the third only came out in September):
Healthcare in the 21st Century
Selling on Amazon.com
Step one, obviously, is to write a good book; I'll assume you have your book written, proofread, and uploaded to Amazon. Now comes the hard part: getting people to buy it!
Reviews
If you're famous, chances are you can put up a book and plenty of people will buy it...and then lots of them will leave reviews anyway. Otherwise, sales and reviews are kind of like jobs and experience - you need one to get the other. Not only is it hard to get sales without reviews, it's hard to get reviews even with sales - most people won't bother unless you specifically ask for one.
With Healthcare in the 21st Century, I went through several thousand of the top reviewers on Amazon looking for people who review nonfiction and listed contact information; I then emailed them asking if they'd be interested in a free review copy. This lead to several detailed reviews, including from someone who is now a top 500 reviewer; this adds credibility to the book, as it's clear that these reviews are from people who have actually read it.
Warning It's impossible to spend much time looking at book promotion without running across offers to have reviews submitted for your book for a fee; indeed, this is how the first person to sell a million Kindle books got going. Don't do this. It's dishonest and you'll eventually get caught.
One option that's becoming popular lately (which I haven't done yet but really should) is to put a note at the end of the book asking the reader to leave a review. You're much more likely to get what you want if you ask for it!
My second book, selling on Amazon, I didn't really promote at all, but it still got some downloads just because it's a popular subject. Eventually several people left five-star ratings, which increased the sales from 2-4 per month up to 10-12 per month. Looking at the page now, I see I've also gotten a 1-star review; clicking on the person's name I see that this is the only review he's ever left, which combined with the lack of content in the review leads me to believe that this is a fake review from someone selling a similar book. Aside from voting it not helpful, I'm just not worrying about it; there's no way to get it removed and it's stupid for an author to argue with a reviewer. Unfortunately, this has crashed my sales - I've only had one sale for that book this month - which is a nice reminder that if you want to make money selling ebooks, you need to write several; when one isn't doing well, another might bring in some money.
Promotions
Once you have a few reviews, it's time to start the promotion. In order to sell a lot of ebooks, you need to be in the top 30k on Amazon. The reason that October was my best month is that the Healthcare book hit #1 in both of its categories and stayed there for most of a week, which meant that for that week I was getting 7-12 sales per day. Why did it suddenly jump up in the rankings? There's no telling...but you can improve your odds.
The Amazon rankings are based on recent sales - and once you move up in the ranking the book becomes more visible, so it's easier to get more sales. Thus, it's to your advantage to have your sales packed into as short a time as possible to move it up in the ranking.
Amazon offers a couple of promotional options for books enrolled in KDP Select: free days and countdown deals. Each has its benefits; in a 90-day period you can do one or the other.
The free day option lets you make your book free for up to 5 days, in any combination; I generally did a 2-day and a 3-day. Originally this would let you boost your ranking quickly, but Amazon now applies an extreme multiplier such that free copies have almost no effect on your ranking once the book returns to paid status. However, free days still have to benefits:
1) They introduce people to your work. A significant percentage of the people who download your book will never get around to reading it (many people download lots of free stuff just to have it) and most of the ones who do will never review it...but of the ones who do read it, if they like it they may come back for more. Thus, free days are great for book one of a series; just put an advertisement at the end of the book for the next one!
2) It helps your book show up on the "also purchased" lists, which helps people browsing similar books to find yours. The trouble is, this may end up being other books that have nothing to do with yours but happened to be free on the same day....but oh well!
Don't just make the book free and forget about it, though - you want to submit it to the free book sites. My personal favorite is pixelofink.com, but there are quite a few.
The other option, which was just introduced a few weeks ago, in the Kindle Countdown Deals in which you can have your book available at a lower price for up to a week. This is better than just changing the price, for two reasons: the buyer can see that there's a discount (and that the clock is ticking), introducing a sense of urgency, and you still get the 70% royalty if your price is dropped from a price in the 70% range down to a price that would normally be outside of it. I normally introduce my books at 99c and then increase the price to $2.99 after a month; I'm now using the KCD to occasionally send them back to ($0.99/$1.99) for a few days to encourage impulse buys.
Question
I was thinking about doing a series on the whole Kindle publishing process. If you found this diary useful, what would you like to see me write about next?
Wed Nov 13, 2013 at 9:32 AM PT: I've expanded on the pricing discussion in the comments with a second diary.