Proper Job Free Today and Tomorrow

by Ian Hocking

I’m investigating this Kindle Select business, which is a new service offered by Amazon that allows Kindle authors to put their books forward for a lending scheme. The catch is that Amazon requires such an author to publish via the Kindle platform exclusively. Not such a catch for me, as I sell, on average, zero books elsewhere.

Once an author’s book is in the Kindle Select programme, it is eligible for five days of free promotion every ninety days. So, as an experiment, I’m making my novel Proper Job free for today and tomorrow, just to see what happens.

Update at 11:30

I was concerned about what would happen to the rank of a promoted book. That is, when being promoted, at what position would the book enter the ‘free’ chart? Would it even go into the ‘free’ chart, or just be marked as ‘free’ in the paid chart? After the promotion, at what position would it re-enter the paid chart?

Well, Proper Job has essentially had its ranking stripped. It no longer has a ranking according to its Amazon information page, and on the KDP dashboard (the back-end that authors have access to), the ranking information is marked as ‘unavailable’. So it looks as though promoted books are de-indexed.

However, this doesn’t mean that people can’t find the book. 14 copies were ‘sold’ in the US since it became free; and 26 in the UK. To put that in perspective, I’ve sold at 86p only 34 copies of Proper Job since it was published in November.

I’ll post more data here as it becomes available.

Update at 12:00

Amazon has now indexed Proper Job in the ‘free’ chart, so I guess there isn’t a ‘limbo’ chart after all. The delay is almost certainly a lag due to database updates and letting an hour’s worth of ‘sales’ accrue to compute the new ranking.

As a data point, Proper Job was ranked at position 8,299 in yesterday’s paid chart and is now at 1, 665 in the free chart. That’s for the UK. In the US, the ranking is still classed as unknown.

Update at 20:30

Now ranked at 862 in the US for free books, and 34 in the Humor chart. In the UK, it’s at 304 in the overall chart and 18 in the Humour chart. US sales: 183. UK sales: 92.