My Kindle Scout Experience

**Spoiler Alert** I didn’t get picked for a publishing contract. LOL

I’ve been doing this indie author thing since 2011 and I like to try new things, so I thought I would give Kindle Scout a try. Best case-publishing contract. Worst case-have to wait 45 days to put up new release.

You have to get approved just to participate. I don’t know what percentage, if any, that they disallow, but I’m a worrier. So it was a long 2 days while I waited to hear.

I needed a 1-liner. Something catchy to get attention to my campaign. I went with:

A ghost can’t compete with a real man. It was simple and encapsulated the theme of my story. I was happy with that.

Next, I needed the short book description. I went with:

Megan Trent misses her deceased husband every day, until he returns as a sexy, ghostly visitor every night. When the visitations turn twisted and dark, she knows she’s in too deep to stop the madness on her own. Jack O’Malley, founder of Ghost Releasers, Inc. is her only hope. Sparks fly from the moment the two meet, but Jack isn’t willing to compete with a ghost. Even with her dead husband’s final release, a dark danger remains to torment her. Jack and Megan must fight evil intentions in this world and ghostly intentions in the next to save their lives and their love.

I loved the description. It read nicely. It said what I wanted to say. But…it was too many characters for what KS allows. So, had to pare it down but save the essence of what it said.

Megan Trent misses her deceased husband every day, but he returns as a sexy, ghostly visitor every night. When the visits turn twisted and dark, she knows she can’t stop the madness on her own. Jack O’Malley, founder of Ghost Releasers, Inc. is her only hope. Sparks fly from the moment the two meet, but Jack isn’t willing to compete with a ghost. Even with her dead husband’s release, a dark danger remains. Jack and Megan must fight to save their lives and their love against ghostly intentions.

It’s okay, but I wasn’t thrilled with it. It would have to do. Then there is the blurb. You don’t get to decide the blurb, they do it for you. I think it ended on a nice spot, so that was all good.

Next, you have to decide how much you will advertise and promote the entry. I went with the minimum I wanted to do. I used a service called readper for a nice bounce in the middle, but no spillage of the days after. Authorshout was a tweeting service and I believe it kept me with at least some page views every day of the campaign.

The best Hot and Trending days were at the beginning, in the middle when I sent newsletters to my subscribers, and at the end when it was in the Ending Soon category. Note to self: if I did it again, I would divide my newsletter subscribers into mini 100-200 names subsets and send a subset a newsletter each day to spread out the page views longer.

I had to wait 12 days to get my no, thank you email. But considering that we used to have to wait months, years, forever to hear from agents and editors, it wasn’t so bad.

I formatted Ghostly Intentions for self-publishing while I was waiting to hear, so it was ready to go the day after I got the rejection. It got a nice ranking from the Scouts hearing it was now available, that it was just 99¢, and also in Kindle Unlimited.

My takeaway from the experience: I think I would do it again, but only with a first in series. Others have said it is hard to get them interested in a book 2, 3, etc. And I would spend a little more money with Facebook ads perhaps to promote myself to see more hours of hot and trending. I ended up with 178 out of 720 hours Hot and Trending and 2.7k page views. Not sure how many nominations that included, but in the 5k range for page views seemed more the norm for others. kboards.com is the ultimate must-read if you are thinking of doing this. They are supportive and knowledgeable.

You can check out Ghostly Intentions at Amazon. Thanks!!

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Jill James, romance author