I'm looking for the buyer's perspective here. Amazon sells millions of kindle books every year. If you've bought kindle books what made you buy the book? Did you hear about the book on some site? Did a friend tell you about the book? I'm trying to find ways to market the Novel I intend to publish on Amazon Kindle. Any tips will be appreciated.
I use a boutique e-book publishing agency that uses several ways to market. You can use Amazon Prime and they will do some marketing for you. However, they want exclusive rights to the marketing so you can't use other sites. I use Amazon (not prime, but they also set up a paperback option through CreateSpace) and Smashwords which is a site that allows you to give friends and family a discount coupon for the first month of your promotion. I don't really know how to set it all up because my publishing agency:Log In Does it all for me. They have a discount program called, 'Write Your Own Discount' where you can write short stories for a 50% discount off of the fee. I am still learning as I go but a friend who published on her own said the expense was very great and after years of trying to sell her pre-printed books, she doesn't think they will ever get their money back. So far, I have made back what I put into it and then a little bit extra that I'm put into my first novel which is coming out at the end of the month. My goal is to make double of what I put into it so that I will have enough to do another project, and I still feel like I'm getting paid for my work.
If using Amazon prime will grant Amazon exclusive marketing rights then I don't think that would be great. I have some experience doing online marketing. Maybe it would be much better to use the kind of services you've recommended and then on the side, try to do some marketing on social media, book review sites and probably a few more other places.
