Watching My KDP Dashboard Is Like “Reading” Tea Leaves
No, I’m not into reading tea leaves. But I do feel as if trying to fathom what works and what doesn’t on Amazon is like trying to read the future without the benefit of a crystal ball.
Obviously Amazon is not about to tell us authors all Amazon’s secrets. So we do have to try to puzzle out the mysteries for ourselves.
This means for those of us who have our ebooks on Kindle we may spend inordinate amounts of time checking our KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) dashboard to see whether there have been any new purchases of our books. And then we try to figure out from what actions the purchases may have resulted.
At this moment the Navy thriller LT. COMMANDER MOLLIE SANDERS that I wrote with my husband is number 10 on Amazon’s submarine fiction list. (Click here to see the list although MOLLIE may have changed in the ranking.)
But if you click here and go to the Amazon Kindle page for MOLLIE, there is no indication of this.
It seems to me that readers coming to a book’s page might like to know when the book ranks well in a sub-category. But that info usually does not get displayed.
While I am a big fan of how Amazon helps authors sell their books, I do wish that some of the curtains of mystery could be pulled back. But I’m not holding my breath for this to happen.
If you do like military thriller stories, U.S. Navy thriller LT. COMMANDER MOLLIE SANDERS is FREE on Kindle on Tuesday, November 27th, at http://amzn.to/NUpy9o
And if you’d like to hear news of when my other Kindle books have a free day, please add your name below. (And if you don’t have a Kindle, you can get a FREE Kindle app for your iPhone, iPad, Android, PC or Mac at http://amzn.to/NBoSGU):
© 2012 Miller Mosaic LLC
Phyllis Zimbler Miller is a former military spouse as well as the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks, including the military fiction MRS. LIEUTENANT: A Sharon Gold Novel and the cozy mystery CAST THE FIRST STONE with a subplot of non-combat trauma PTSD.
Click here to visit her Amazon author page at amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller
She also has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the online marketing company www.MillerMosaicLLC.com