Tag Archives: marketing children’s books

Jul 22 2014

Marketing Children’s Books with Kindle Unlimited

Childrens Reading

Marketing Opportunity for Children’s Authors

Children’s authors—and to some extent, even tween and teen authors—have the potential to use Kindle Unlimited as a marketing opportunity.

There are many parents, teachers, educators, and librarians who would love kids to READ much more.

Kindle Unlimited is an incredible value for parents:

  • Bedtime stories. Kindle Unlimited gives access to a huge collection of children’s stories, far more than can be stored on a bookshelf. Some of those children’s book are pretty expensive, too, but Kindle Unlimited offers an amazing selection for $9.99 per month. Kids will love the opportunity to read along on a Kindle Fire (or another device) as the parent operates the device.
  • Reading fluency. From elementary school to young adults, access to tens of thousands of children’s, tween, and teen stories for $9.99 per month is a great opportunity to encourage kids to develop a love for reading by finding books that interest them. Get a book they didn’t like? No problem: Find another! The more they read, the more fluent they will become (it helps not only improve English, but also writing and vocabulary—years of practice will be valuable on standardized exams), and the more they will want to read as they get older. Help make reading a habit.
  • Educational resource. Need homework help? Need more practice? Want to learn more about a topic that caught your interest in school? Kindle Unlimited provides access to numerous Kindle educational titles that can help with learning, study aids, and nonfiction reading. Parents can learn more, too, or discover books that help them teach particular skills. All that at your fingertips for $9.99 per month.
  • Access to a library on your fingertips. Would you rather have your child searching on the internet—where they can find lord knows what—for school help, or would you rather have access to a huge library of published e-books for $9.99 per month? You can check out up to 10 titles at a time. Then simply return one title to check out another.

If every parent takes full advantage of Kindle Unlimited there would be an astronomical amount of downloads (thereby diminishing the KDP Select download royalty). But many parents won’t realize the full potential, and there are many people subscribing to Kindle Unlimited who aren’t parents or who aren’t subscribing for the benefit of their kids. There also is a Restrictions paragraph in the terms of use. Amazon didn’t specify a number, but if you go overboard downloading books, that paragraph might become applicable.

But Kindle Unlimited is an amazing resource for parents. I’m certainly subscribing.

Authors of children’s, tween, and even teen books can take advantage of this. Show parents what a value this is for their children, with examples of how they can use it well. Emphasize how it can help with reading and learning.

The more parents who use Kindle Unlimited to help build reading fluency or improve learning, the more children’s authors in KDP Select who will be benefiting from more downloads through Kindle Unlimited.

You have the opportunity to gain visibility among parents while advertising the educational benefits of Kindle Unlimited. Surely, many parents will check out your children’s books for helping them see the benefits.

All authors enrolled in KDP Select need to be thinking about possible benefits of Kindle Unlimited for their books, and striving to find marketing strategies to help realize these benefits. For example, if you’re a flash fiction author, you want to advertise to flash fiction readers how they can get a great value from Kindle Unlimited.

It’s not just KDP Select books or just indie books. There are 100,000 books from various (mostly small publishers) in addition to 500,000 books from KDP Select. Harry Potter and many other books that your kids may want to read are in the mix.

Chris McMullen

Copyright © 2014 Chris McMullen, Author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers

  • Volume 1 on formatting and publishing
  • Volume 2 on marketability and marketing

Follow me at WordPress, find my author page on Facebook, or connect with me through Twitter.

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Jun 3 2014

Children’s Categories & Marketing @ Kindle

Kindle Age

INTRODUCTION

This is a two-part post:

  1. First, I will discuss a cool new feature that Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) just introduced to help categorize children’s Kindle books.
  2. Next, I will share an idea to help market children’s Kindle books.

AGE & GRADE LEVELS

As of now, Step 3 of the KDP publishing process allows you to select an Age Range and a separate US Grade Range.

Tip: Open up your children’s, tween, and teen Kindle books on your Bookshelf and update Step 3. You’ll need to republish for this to take effect.

This will help give your juvenile book added visibility on Amazon:

  • Your book will show up when customers select one of the age group or grade level filters in Amazon search results.
  • You no longer need to waste a crucial keyword to get listed in the children’s age group categories. Tip: If you used a keyword to accomplish this in the past, you can now change that keyword to something else, if you wish.
  • These age group and grade level settings apply to the Schools and Teaching store.
  • These settings are supposed to apply to the Children’s Kindle Book stores for both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

What about CreateSpace paperbacks? Well, it wouldn’t hurt our chances if several authors suddenly made this request. Hint, hint.

KDP has a table with suggestions for the different age groups: Click here to view it.

I love these new age group and grade level options at Kindle. I’ve been hoping for this for years, and I’m probably one of many authors who’ve requested it in my interactions with KDP. It’s a great opportunity for children’s e-book authors.

MARKETING IDEA

As you may know if you follow my blog, I had the opportunity to talk to members of the Kindle Educational Team a few weeks ago.

They are hoping to see more educators and authors who would like to educate via books publish helpful educational content on Kindle. They have recently reached out to authors to hear our perspective from the publishing end. These new age group and grade level options are one step toward accomplishing this.

So here is my idea:

Education covers many topics. One subject relates to most juvenile fiction stories: English. This includes reading, reading comprehension, writing, vocabulary, grammar, and so on.

Suppose you have a collection of short stories, poems, novellas, novel, or other children’s fictional work for children, tweens, or teens. If so, there is a simple way to improve the marketability of your children’s book:

  • Create some teacher- or parent-oriented resources for your book. I’ll list a few examples below to get your brain churning.
  • You could include these in your book, or you could add a page to your book describing free educational resources available on your blog or website, which parents or teachers could use to get educational value out of your stories. The latter option has the advantage of giving readers a reason to visit your blog and follow you (plus it doesn’t make your book resemble a textbook for kids just looking to enjoy fiction).
  • Your stories are still marketable as stories, but now they are also marketable as educational resources to parents, teachers, homeschool instructors, libraries, and other educators. The free resources become an added marketing tool.

Here are a few ideas for creating educational resources to go along with your story:

  • Add vocabulary definitions and exercises relating to your content.
  • Write questions that assess reading comprehension for your story.
  • Come up with essay questions relating to your book.
  • Make creative writing questions stemming from your story or characters.
  • Create a grammar worksheet to go along with your content.
  • For historical novels, you may be able to add history lessons and exercises.
  • For science fiction novels, you might be able to come up with related science questions and exercises.
  • If your protagonist is bilingual, there is an opportunity for language lessons.
  • If you can find ways that your book relates to one or more school subjects, this gives you more opportunities.

READ TUESDAY

You may be aware that I launched an event in 2013 called Read Tuesday, which debuted in December. You can check out the website here: readtuesday.com.

Read Tuesday is a Black Friday event just for books. One big goal of the event is to help inspire reading.

In 2014, I would like to add a special page highlighting juvenile books that include educational resources (either in the book itself, or free resources that readers can find on the author’s blog or website). So if you have such a book and you’re willing to participate in Read Tuesday 2014 (which requires having your book on sale that day), in addition to listing your book in the Read Tuesday catalog, there will be a special page to showcase juvenile books with free educational resources available. I think this may be a good way for Read Tuesday to help promote reading.

Chris McMullen

Author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers

  • Volume 1 on formatting and publishing
  • Volume 2 on marketability and marketing

Follow me at WordPress, find my author page on Facebook, or connect with me through Twitter.

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