My hearts, this is the third and final installment of my interview with K. Iwancio. After our initial interview, I had more questions. This final bit is all about K.’s success as an indie author.

JEN: You recently posted about more than 6,000 processed orders—after a Stuff Your Kindle event, I think. I would love an explanation of how that works and if you see benefits after a surge like that.

K.:  Ah, so the Stuff Your Kindle events are awesome. You do have to be invited and accepted into a group and some limit your participation to once a year so be mindful which ones you participate in. The only hang up is that you need to give away your book for free. But even a free book won't entice the readers. Your book needs a fantastic 20ish word synopsis and an attractive cover. That's all readers get before clicking your link. If you have a series, it makes sense to offer the first book in your series free so they come back for the rest if they liked the first. Did I see a boost in sales? A little. It also helped boost the pre order sales for the second book by a lot. The first one I did I had over 12,000 downloads and had a huge spike in reviews for about two weeks after. Apparently, readers downloaded my book and immediately started reading. But beware, these readers are harsh critics. The second event I did I had over 18,000 downloads and was the bestselling book out of the over 100 that were participating. I hit #1 on 2 different charts, and the #3 bestselling free Kindle book overall during the event. I did have a handful of social media people tag my book in posts and videos, so that was cool. 

JEN: That’s amazing. I’m sure that kind of success in a sea of books like that is due to your ridiculously cute covers!

Back to your success. I think I saw you post your KENP one time. How do you get those numbers up?

NOTE from Jen: KENP, or Kindle Edition Normalized Pages, is a metric that Amazon uses to track how many pages of an ebook are read by Kindle Unlimited subscribers. It’s a way for authors to earn money from their books that are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited (KU), Amazon’s ebook subscription service. When an author enrolls their book in KDP Select, it becomes available for KU subscribers to read for free. For each page read, the author receives a KENP rate which is usually around $0.0045 but can fluctuate each month.

K.: KENP numbers are a slow process. For the first 14 months of being a published author, I had less than 1,000 page reads every month. Hilariously enough I had 24,000 page reads total last year. This year I'm over 350,000, and the year isn't over yet! But it wasn't until after the first Stuff Your Kindle event that I saw a HUGE spike. I also had a highly anticipated release come out the month after the Stuff Your Kindle so I think that helped too. For the last 6ish months, I've had 40,000 - 75,000 page reads every month. But it took a long time to get there. And you'll have slow months. January and August are tough with the post holidays and back to school time. Right now, August will be my lowest page read month since January. Those page reads are still minimal but it's wild to see how far I've come over last year. My next goal is 100k page reads in a month! 

My best piece of advice for getting page read numbers up is to continue to promote all your books at all times. But the focus shouldn't be on page reads since I get paid less than 50% of what I make on the direct sale of the eBook. It should be on the actual sale of the whole book. KU is nice, but it’s not fair to indie authors.

JEN: K., thank you for being so transparent with all this information. I nearly didn’t post this final part of our interview because I feared it was too “in the weeds"—but I know my indie author readers will thrill to hear your story. Thank you for being so candid. I appreciate you so much.

And here is how you find K., my hearts. Her website is kiwancio.com. She’s on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

Are you a human author? A human who narrates audiobooks? A human who designs book covers? Or a human who does PR and promotion for other authors? I'd love to interview you, too. Let me know when you’re ready!