Today I have a special guest! Courtenay is going to share something that all Indie authors should know. And if you are a reader in Canada, you might be interested in this too. Even if you’re neither of those, you might find this interesting.

Kindle Countdown: How to Make Sure Your Sale is Reaching ALL Your Readers

As a Canadian author and Kindle-user, I have spent the last several years encountering a mystifying problem that is shared by a huge sector of non-American eBook buyers.

When authors run promotional deals on Amazon.com, the sale sometimes translates to the Canadian site. And sometimes it doesn’t.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve excitedly clicked through, eager to spend my $0.99 on a book that everyone’s raving about—only to discover that on Amazon.ca, there isn’t any promotion running at all.

But Only Sometimes?

This is the really strange part of the whole business.

It ISN’T always.

Some authors’ price drops work just fine. Click through from the American site to the Canadian site, and there is the book, on sale just like you hoped it would be.

The kind of embarrassing part of the whole business? When I tried to run a Kindle Countdown deal on one of my own books, I found out I wasn’t one of the works-in-Canada authors. My book went on sale on Amazon.com. And NOWHERE ELSE!

How crazy is that?

I’m a Canadian author, and I can’t even put my book on sale in my own country. Nor can I direct Canadian readers to the U.S. site. Because Kindle already has a Canadian platform, Amazon.com does not allow Canadian account holders to purchase eBooks through the American site.

This goes for purchasers in Australia, India, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, and Mexico, as well. (It technically applies to purchasers in the United Kingdom, too, but as we’ll see below, there’s a simpler workaround available in their case.)

So What’s Happening?

This past week, I finally did some digging to figure out exactly what was going on. I found out very quickly that Kindle Countdown deals only work in two markets: Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

Deals in each marketplace must be scheduled as separate promotions. But you can use the Kindle Countdown system, and reach both markets.

Kindle Countdown deals simply cannot be run anywhere else.

Now, in order to participate in a Countdown deal, an eBook also has to be enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. And to do that requires Amazon exclusivity.

There lies the solution to the mystery.

Any author who sells their eBook on another platform, such as Kobo or Google Play for instance, is ineligible to enroll in Kindle Unlimited—and therefore, to run Countdown deals.

So what do authors do when they want to run a sale, but can’t use Kindle Countdown? The answer is simple. They use their KDP dashboard to do a manual price drop instead.

And that’s exactly what I’m going to walk you through, for your international markets, today!

Before we start on that, however, there’s one other important note I discovered along the way:

FREE Books Aren’t the Problem!

This is the really weird, weird, WEIRD part of the whole thing. If you schedule a free book promotion on Amazon, it runs just fine across all markets. In fact, KDP doesn’t even ask you to select a marketplace for a free deal. You just choose your dates, and it runs automatically across platforms.

I’m not attempting to explain the why and wherefore of that. Maybe it’s a logistics issue. Maybe it has something to do with conforming to varying promotional regulations in international markets. But whatever the case, if you want to run a book absolutely free outside the US/UK you won’t have any problems. It’s only when you’re doing a lowered sales price for your promotional that you’re going to want to do a manual price drop for international markets.

How to Do a Manual Price Drop

Step One: Schedule your Countdown deal for Amercian/British markets, just as you usually would. You want to make sure you do this step first, particularly if you’re working with a tight timeline, because after you manually drop the price in other markets, there will be a processing window, (usually at least a couple of hours,) before the new price goes live. During this window you won’t be able to use any of the editing/promotions features for that particular book. So just to keep things running smoothly, always make sure you schedule your main sale for the .com and .co.uk sites FIRST.

Now for the manual price drop:

Step Two: Go into your KDP dashboard. (That part’s easy—you do it all the time!)

Step Three: Scroll down to the book you want to put on sale. Hover over the three dots, and select “Edit eBook Pricing.”

Step Four: Scroll down once more, until you get to “Pricing, royalty, and distribution.” You’ll see a big grey-and-white chart, listing all the markets in which your book is sold, the price in local currency for each of those markets, the delivery fee, the royalty percentage, and the actually royalty you make on each sale.

If you’ve set your book up in the usual way, the price for each of these international markets is simply being calculated automatically off the American price. However, this is a matter of choice. To drop your price for an international sale, scroll down to the market or markets where you want to run the promotional. Backspace the numbers in the “list price” box, and replace them with the sale price of your choice.

As a test example: suppose you’re running a $0.99 Kindle Countdown deal in the U.S., and you want to extend that sale to Canadian customers. You backspace the Canadian price (which is probably somewhere around $6.65, for a full-length novel.) Directly under the list price box you will see a line of text telling you “Must be $2.99-$9.99”. This is the price bracket required in the Canadian market, if you want to maintain your 70% royalty rate. (Which obviously you want to do if you can help it!)

If you scroll up to the top of “Pricing, royalty and distribution” you DO have the choice to change your royalty rate to 35%, and open up your pricing window from $0.99-$200.00, but I don’t recommend this. It substantially drops your earnings. And it does it for ALL markets, not just the one you’re targeting with your manual sale.

So, that pretty much sets $2.99 as the lowest promotional you can run in Canada. Which, from a Canadian point of view, is still a pretty good sale! The exchange rate fluctuates, but Canadian dollars tend to be worth less than American ones—just as British pounds are always worth more.

Whatever market you are dealing with, set your sale at the lower end of the required bracket for that market, and you can be pretty sure you’re offering buyers a substantial promotional.

Step Five: Scroll to the bottom of the page. Hit the yellow “Publish Your Kindle eBook” button. And sometime within the next 24 hours (but typically in less than 12) your sale price will go live on Amazon.

Two Important Notes:

1. Because you have manually dropped the price, you will not see the fancy little sale motif, where the old price is crossed out, and the new price appears tagged as a sale. If you’re promoting your sale through your own website/social media, etc., your readers will already know it’s going on. If a random viewer simply ends up on the page, they’ll just think the price is amazingly low. Either way, no great harm done!
2. DO NOT FORGET TO COME BACK, and return your price to normal, when you’re done with the sale. Otherwise, your international buyers will just get a permanently generous giveaway! Kind, but more than any of us were asking for. You can reset the price for each market very easily by clicking “Base all market places on this price” (which you will find right below the Amazon.com list price, at the top of the chart.)

Is It Worth the Trouble?

At the end of the day, that’s a question each author is going to want to decide for themselves.

Conducting a manual price drop takes a small investment of time, but it’s not really complicated or onerous. As a matter of fact, it took me only one minute and thirty-two seconds to complete a test price drop in all available markets, when I went into KDP this morning to try it out.

And while your international market will probably never be the biggest sector of your readership, there’s a good chance you have at least SOME non-American followers, who would be quick to make a purchase, if a sale was available on their local Amazon site.

I’m obviously biased, but in my opinion, selling even one copy you wouldn’t otherwise have sold is a win-win situation for both author and reader.

Have any other tips for promoting books to overlooked/underexploited audiences? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below!

Courtenay Burden is a Victorian fanatic and author of historical fiction, from southern Ontario. She loves working with yarn, playing the occasional game of chess, devouring history, and discovering new ways to cook the humble potato. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her sketching, reading anything published more than a century ago, or attempting to sing alto with growing confidence. You can connect with her at www.sawpublishing.com or on Instagram @courtenayburden.

And there you have it! Thanks for sharing, Courtenay!

Have you ever wished you could make one of your books on sale in a different country? Or have you ever wished a book that was on sale someone would be on sale where you could get it? Do you buy kindle books full price, on sale, wait until they’re free, or something else?