How to Get More KDP Reads, Pick a Launch Date, and Handle DRM (Questions Authors Keep Asking)

Ferol Vernon (00:14.921)

Hello and welcome to the Written Word Media Podcast. I am Ferol here with Ricci. And Ricci, today’s show is something of a milestone. And I kind of wanted to start with a little bit of a thank you. We recently surpassed 10,000 downloads on the pod. It’s a little over a year old. And just wanted to thank our listeners because that’s a really cool milestone for us, and this has been, you know, an amazing project.

Ricci (00:38.209)

Yeah, super exciting. We got a cool little badge inside of our podcast hosting platform that said 10,000 downloads. so we got really excited about that. even more exciting has been both how many more people are listening with every week that passes and how engaged you all are. we’re getting comments on the pod on the different platforms, people are writing into the inbox.

and it’s just so cool and heartwarming to hear from you all, both your your kudos, your comments and your questions. So thank you so much for supporting us on this journey, somewhat nerve wracking but also exciting and fun journey that we’re on with this pod. We really appreciate you.

Ferol Vernon (01:21.021)

Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (01:26.398)

Yeah, I always say it’s at some point when that little countdown thing goes to record, I’ll stop getting nervous. But that that hasn’t happened yet. yeah, we’ll see. but what we wanted to do today is you know, one of the most like Ricci said, one of most inspiring and cool things is that people write in. And so we wanted to do today is take three of our most common questions that we get that authors write in and unpack them a little bit.

Ricci (01:33.555)

Maybe at year two.

Ferol Vernon (01:52.078)

And sort of do, you know, three common themes that we hear a lot. And you know, I forgot my password. We’re not going to get into that one, even though that’s a common customer service request for us. And we’re happy to help you with it. but these are sort of the more thorny things that take a little bit more time. And we thought it would be a good idea to walk through those. 

Ricci (06:18.957)

Okay, well thanks Ferol for the setup. So the three listener questions that we are going to answer today are in the order that we’ll address them. Number one, what is DRM and do I actually need it? Number two, when is the best time to launch a book? And number three, I’m in KU, how do I get more KDP reads?

Ferol Vernon (06:46.931)

Right. And so I think, you know, just jumping right into those three questions, I think, you know, the first one is like, what is DRM and, you know, do I need it? And I think this is a really interesting question. And we are going to answer it very clearly, but I want to give the the audience a little context and a little background. So DRM is digital rights management. So on its surface, its intent is to protect the content creator, the author, that’s you, from people stealing their content.

And so you can imagine the, you know, the classic example is Amazon, where you know, you get a book and that book only lives and only can be read on your Kindle, right? And so the digital format, if you try to, you know, ship it somewhere else, you can’t read it, or at least not easily. And that’s DRM, and it’s supposed to be so that I, if I buy a book from you in a digital format, I can’t lend it to my friend unless I’m using, you know, a Kindle lending feature or something.

And there, you know, DRM has been around for a long time. And I was in the music industry when DRM was a hot topic. and the world has changed a lot. But I think what’s important for authors to understand, and there’s some recent news about this, which is part of the reason we’re talking about it and getting more questions, but what’s important for authors to understand is the different levels of DRM. So what I just described with Amazon is kind of what we refer to as hard DRM.

It is like a walled garden. It’s one of these big companies that protects the digital content and makes it hard to share. Then, you know, what’s become common also recently is kind of this like soft DRM or social DRM, where the individual file that’s getting purchased or delivered has some kind of unique tagging on it. So if your email address and you get this file gets shared somewhere on a torrent site or something like that.

It’s tagged to you. And so you can sort of be shamed into saying, like, hey, you stole this content and you shared it. You’re responsible. you know, that is like soft DRM because it’s still relatively easy to distribute, but there’s a little bit of tracking there. And then there’s no DRM, which is where you sell the file, the the book file to the reader, and they can do with it whatever they want, whether they want to post it online, share it with a friend, whatever. So I think

Ferol Vernon (09:04.302)

One of the things that’s really important from a philosophy standpoint is, you know, what are you having a problem with? And so I think if you’re having a problem where too many people are getting your books, then DR might be something to explore. But for most of the authors listening, their problem is not enough people are listening to my book or reading my book, right? And so when you add DRM, you’re adding sharing friction, right? When people you know, I can’t lend a book, I can’t send a book.

And so I think you know, our general rick recommendation is for indie authors who are want to get more audience, you don’t need DRM. And our friends at Ally, the Alliance of Independent Authors, share this same notion that in general, you you don’t want to check DRM because you want to put as little friction as possible between the file and the reader. Now, the reason why this is timely and why we’re starting to get more questions on it is that Amazon

has actually changed their policy you know about you know earlier this year. And the way DRM used to work on Amazon is you had to make this choice when you published the book and then you couldn’t change it. So if I said I want DRM and my book, you know, I published my book five years ago, I was stuck with that decision. I could never flip that switch. Earlier this year they changed that. So now you can change the DRM settings on your book sort of midstream.

And so I think, you know, this is one of those things that we would sort of chalk up as individual choice. So every author needs to have their own choice on what they want to do about DRM. But our recommendation is if you’re trying to get more audience, DRM is a little piece of friction. And then the final thing I’ll say about this is even with hard DRM in some of these walled gardens, it’s not that much protection. So if somebody’s really motivated and they have access to a computer and a little bit of technical know-how, you can break even hard DRM.

You can break social DRM like is it’s really not that difficult. So, you know, what I want to make sure authors who choose that path understand is that’s a little bit of an illusion of protection because anybody who’s motivated to sort of undo the DRM on your on your file and share it really can do that already. And so, you know, just sort of embracing a world where things are shareable and somebody owns the file, I think is kind of where we landed on this.

Ricci (11:29.79)

Okay, so non-techy here, let me try and say back what I’m hearing from you, Ferol. So hard DRM is what comes included if you are distributing say through Amazon or Apple or Kobo, but on Amazon now you can uncheck the DRM button and turn DRM off. What what does that actually mean? Like if you uncheck that button on Amazon, what’s the difference?

Ferol Vernon (11:52.301)

Yeah. Yeah. So when you have DRM on, and I’m talking just about Amazon now, for example, but the other systems work in a similar manner. essentially what you’re buying as a reader is a license to read the book. You don’t have the book, right? Because it’s DRM’d and linked to your device, your Kindle most of the time, or your iPad or whatever. And so that is is like, you know, realistically what’s happening. Whereas when you turn DRM off, you’re delivering the file.

And that file can be freely shared. So let’s say I have a friend that has an open source e-reader, right? Or something like that. I can send them the file that I bought on Amazon because I own it and I’m allowed to share it with them, right? And then it’ll work. Whereas if I have that file DRM’d and I try to share it with them, it’s going to become very difficult unless I use some, you know, illegal software to break the DRM, which again is not technically difficult, but you know, you shouldn’t do.

so that you know functionally it’s around really around sharing the book that is easier or or more difficult.

Ricci (12:56.646)

Got it. Okay, so hard DRM is what comes included. If you keep that box checked, then when somebody gets the book, they can read it on their Kindle, but really hard for them to share to someone else. If you uncheck that box, if somebody wanted to then share the book with somebody else, they could. Soft DRM is what is being used, say if you’re doing like a book funnel,

Ferol Vernon (13:24.831)

Exactly.

Ricci (13:26.009)

you know, giveaway or you’re using one of our lead magnets where you’re actually giving away an electronic copy of your book, but at the bottom it’s kind of watermarked with the email address of who downloaded that book. It’s some metadata. And then no DRM is where you’re not doing anything at all, which is probably what most authors are doing maybe when they’re selling books and audiobooks off of their direct stores.

Ferol Vernon (13:36.886)

Some metadata, yeah.

Ricci (13:50.93)

unless you’re using some kind of third party service to put the DRM on there for you or some kind of distribution service that is putting DRM on there for you.

Ferol Vernon (14:00.725)

Exactly.

Ricci (14:03.002)

O, I think I got it. Let’s move on to the second question, which is when is the best time to launch a book? Let me start with kind of the industry trends around this, and then we actually did some deep dive data into our customer base, 

Ferol Vernon (14:24.565)

Yeah.

Ricci (14:31.554)

we’re gonna share that with you as well. the TLDR is that the truth is wh whenever you want. What’s more important than trying to pick a day or time of year to launch a book is that you’re actually ready and that you’ve done the marketing pre-work in order to create buzz and get some traction around your book, especially in the first 90 days after launch. But if we look at the traditional publishing industry, their biggest launch

Time of year is fall traditionally. And there are two reasons for that. The first is that people are coming back from summer and they tend to get into routine and they start reading books again. Book sales tend to increase around this time of year. and then the second is it’s pre holiday. And so a lot of traditional publishers want to get their books out there onto the shelf and creating some buzz so that readers will then go on to purchase these books as holiday gifts come

Ferol Vernon (15:02.762)

Yeah.

Ricci (15:29.293)

the December holiday season. So in terms of seasonality, traditional publishers tend to publish the most books in the fall. That’s not the only time that they publish though. They publish all throughout the year. So I’m not saying you need to take that as any kind of gospel. And then the other interesting thing about the traditional publishing industry is that they always drop new releases on a Tuesday. So our brand New in Books, we send out our New InBooks email every Tuesday because that’s when the vast majority of books are dropping.

within the traditional ecosystem. Some indie authors choose to follow that pattern and also, you know, publish on a Tuesday. Once again, don’t have to, but that’s what the traditional publishing industry does themselves. Now let’s talk about like the data on indie authors specifically. So Ferol, what what did you find out when you look through the thousands and thousands of authors who have launched books with us?

Ferol Vernon (16:24.552)

Yeah, so I think, you know, a subsection of the question that we actually get is, you know, what’s the best time to launch a book? But a lot of times there’s like, what’s the best day of the week to launch a book? So we talked about Tuesdays. So before I give you the data, I’m gonna sort of unpack the strategy here. So like you could do it on Tuesdays when there’s buzz around books and all the new books are coming around and say, I’m gonna ride the wave. Or you could say, you know, to heck with that, I’m gonna launch.

When not everybody else is launching, and I’m not going to compete with the traditional publisher. So I’m going to launch on a day that’s not Tuesday, like maybe a Friday, when it’s quite a bit after all their buzz has has died down. So, you know, that that’s really a personal choice. And what we found in the data in terms of like day of the week is that there’s no statistical difference for any day of the week on a launch. So there was a little bit of a signal where like maybe Saturday is not the best day, but like, you know, I’m gonna say that everyone’s listening, I’m not gonna launch on Saturdays, but that means.

know Saturdays might be less competition, right? So I think there’s this balance between like, do you want to compete and ride the wave, or do you want to, you know, operate when other people aren’t operating? Both are valid. And based on our data, literally all seven days of the week have the you know roughly the same performance in terms of click through rates. So, you know, you it’s not a decision that we feel like you have to agonize over. And I think a lot of people are looking for like a cheat code or a hack and like

Unfortunately, here there isn’t one. But I think the good news is it’s one less decision that you really have to worry about. Like you said, Ricci, launch when you’re ready to launch.

Ricci (17:55.423)

Yeah, launch when you’re ready to launch and launch where you can pay attention. You know, sometimes we see that authors are like, I need to launch on a Tuesday, so like they rush the launch, or you know, maybe Tuesday they are working a job and that’s their busy meeting day at work, or they have to be with their kids. and then you’re actually not around to track the progress of what’s happening. You don’t have as much time to do, you know, socials or put together a really comprehensive plan or strategy around that.

Ferol Vernon (17:58.606)

Yeah.

Ricci (18:22.386)

And so if that’s you, I would say no, launch on a Saturday if like you’ve got a day job during the week, launch on the weekend when you have time to actually put towards it and, you know, email and send out all the the marketing activity that you want to do. 

Ferol Vernon (18:29.305)

Yeah, when can focus.

Ricci (18:42.202)

it’s much more important to have a plan than to try shoehorn a plan into a day of the week for no rhyme or reason. And the same would go for the season. You know, for a lot of people like the fall is a really busy season and not a great time to launch whereas you know early in the new year is a great time to launch or maybe the summer is. Or maybe it’s just as simple as like when is the book actually going to be done? So don’t agonize, don’t stress about it. Launch when you are ready and

Ferol Vernon (18:54.979)

Yeah.

Ricci (19:11.643)

spend time on the marketing plan more than trying to figure out if there’s some kind of optimal, magical day out there that’s gonna work better.

Ferol Vernon (19:18.308)

Yeah, I think the the one exception that that you know to this rule, we looked at very large data sets. if your book is like a self-help diet book or something, January is probably a pretty good time to do a launch and to focus on it, right? If you have a, you know, holiday romance, then yeah, December’s go time for you. But I think, you know, broadly speaking, you know, what we’re saying applies and and don’t don’t don’t agonize over the day that we

Ricci (19:45.094)

Yeah, that’s a good point, right? So like you your genre. If you have a beach read, you don’t want to launch that in November, to Ferol’s point. So like let’s use common sense here. But for the most part, if you know, your book is not seasonal in nature, then it’s pretty much okay to pick a time and date that work for you.

Ferol Vernon (19:50.612)

Right.

Ferol Vernon (20:02.691)

Great. okay, so with that dispelled, we next wanna you know go on to one of our sort of most asked questions, which is like, okay, so I’m in KU, how do I get more reads? And I think, you know, Ricci, we’ve done a lot of thinking about this and and we’ve heard this question for quite a quite a quite a number of years.

Ricci (20:21.039)

Yeah, so if you’re in KU, which is Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, that means that you’re published through KDP and you have decided to go KDP Select, which means that you’re exclusive to Amazon. And so your book is only available on Amazon and there are basically two ways you can make money. The first is you sell copies of your book and you earn royalties on that, and the second is that readers who are in KU read your book and you get paid out on the number of pages that those readers have read.

Now, selling copies of books, you know, we all know you’ve got to do marketing to do that. But the question here is, okay, if I’m getting a certain number of reads or I’m not getting any reads at all when I look at my dashboard, how do I get some momentum going? How do I get those reads to perk up? And the answer is actually the same as it is to how do I sell more copies of my book. So what we find is anytime you run a promo or do marketing around a book, not only is it going to lift your sales of your books, it is also going to increase your reads of that book. When we think about our promo sites specifically, like FreeBooksy as an example, there are a lot of readers on FreeBooksy who also are in KU. So those readers will purchase a book.

if it’s not in KU, but if it is in KU then they’re more likely to borrow the book and then when they go on to read that book you will see the reads coming through. The difference here is that there is more of a lag between a sale and a read because the sale you see instantly even if the person doesn’t read the book. But a a read only comes through when the reader literally flips that page. And so a lot of time readers will grab books and put them in their libraries but they won’t actually start reading them till

days or weeks later, so there might be a lag in when you see that bump up in the actual KENP reads that you’re gonna get paid out.

Ferol Vernon (22:27.572)

Yeah, and w and what yeah, and and you know, the everybody has like if you’re in KU, there’s a certain number of books that you can, you know, quote unquote borrow at one time. And so, you know, I always do this, like I stack up books in there where I’m like, this is awesome. I want to read this, but my TBR piles this this never ending, you know, p list of awesome stuff. But a lot of it is just sitting in there in KU and I get to it when I get to it. And so I think, you know, your point about lag is well taken and from personal experience that’s totally how I use it as well, where like you you add it to your library.

And, you know, maybe you read it that day or maybe you read it a few weeks later. but the important thing is that, you know, while your promotion is happening, the reader grabs the copy and that’s strong interest of somebody who’s gonna read your book.

Ricci (23:11.243)

Yeah, and if you run a free promo, which is one of the perks you get being in KDP Select, is that you get these five days every quarter that you can run a free promo. So if you decide to run a free promo, it’s a little bit of a hack because when you run the free promo, yes, people who are not in KU are gonna download the book for free versus buy the book. But if it’s like a book one or you’re introducing somebody into a series, we think that’s a smart move.

But if you’re running a free promo and then say you run a promotion on FreeBooksy, the readers on FreeBooksy who are in KU are going to borrow that book. So instead of giving the book away for free, even though you’re running a free promo, you will still get paid out on the reads as long as that reader borrowed it and put it in their library versus, you know, said, let me let me buy it for for zero dollars. And so we do see the biggest

kind of surge and increase in the reads when it comes to FreeBooksy promos themselves. And it’s a nice way for authors to offset the the cost of free, you know, the cost of giving away a free book because you can actually earn income on those reads versus literally giving away the entire book for free.

Ferol Vernon (24:26.203)

Yeah. And like when when you know, when a reader arrives on that Amazon landing page, if when they click from a free promo, you know, the top button is add to library, right? And and that’s for for at least for KU readers. And so that book, you know, will go in their library and when they start reading it, you will get those reads. but you will also see a lot of free promotions where free downloads, and those don’t count towards your reads necessarily, but you’re getting sort of a two-sided promotion there when you run these kinds of things with us.

Ricci (24:53.493)

Yeah, absolutely. we also do call out in our email newsletters or if you’re buying a reader’s list, free on Kindle Unlimited. So we also are priming the reader to know, yeah, this book is if it says on FreeBooksy, it’s free, but it’s also free on KU, so they know. and if the book is discounted, say it’s a ninety-nine cent book and it’s free on KU, they’re being primed for that as well. So when you’re running a promo in a ninety nine cent book, that should also help you to boost those KENP reads.

Ferol Vernon (25:23.727)

Yeah. and I think, you know, this is one of those questions that we get. We’ve gotten a lot. So I’m I’m happy that we’re unpacking it here for the audience. But the thing, you know, as we kind of wrap up these three questions, we went a little bit of a lightning round there. I think I really want to underscore to the audience is like when you have these questions, let us know. Because, you know, what that triggers us to do is to go deep on it, to figure out the answers and then to talk about it on air. And that’s how we can help you.

so we really encourage the engagement and like some of these questions, you know, we we learn from from comments on the pod or people emailing us directly. Sometimes we check with our customer service team and we say, Hey, what are people asking? And that’s how we get stuff. But I think, you know, it’s really important for for everybody to understand that like we desperately want to hear the questions that you have and and you know it’s it’s fun for us to to figure out how to answer them.

Ricci (26:11.912)

Yeah, it also leads to the products that we build. So, you know, I remember we we did a a series on how to build your email list and what you should be sending to people on your email. Then a bunch of authors wrote in and said, Well, can you guys help me build my email list? And that’s what led to subscriber search giveaways, which is now a very popular product of ours, which actually helps authors add hundreds, if not a thousand

readers to their list so that they can then go on to build that asset that is theirs specifically. And so these these questions help you understand what’s going on, but it also gives us ideas for where there are pain points, where you have needs, and we’re always looking to try and create an easy button to solve some of these challenges that you might be having within your author business.

Ferol Vernon (27:05.953)

Amazing. Okay. So that’s a good place to to wrap up. So the three questions, once again, just to make sure, you know, a little a little recap at the end of the episode here. one, we talked about DRM, you know, what is it and do you actually need it? And some of the recent changes that that Amazon made to make that easier to make the change. you know, in our sort of the short version is we don’t think you need it, if you’re looking for audience, unless you’re having a problem with people stealing your work. two,

When’s the best time to launch a book? There’s no best time. Launch it any day and launch it when you’re ready to focus on the marketing. And then finally, you know, what are what are KNP reads and and how do I get more reads if I’m in KU? And the answer is run a promo, do some marketing. You get a lot of these reads, no matter what state everything is in. And that’s really you know, what we recommend to to every author. So that those are our three questions. That’s the grab bag. Ricci, what did I miss?

What do we want to say to send people off?

Ricci (28:05.377)

I think you did it all. Let us know what you think of this format and looking forward to chatting again in a couple of weeks.

Ferol Vernon (28:12.138)

Awesome. All right, writers. That’s it. That’s the pod. Go write something and we’ll see you next time.