Kindle Scout Diary: Success!

So, I beat the odds, and The Standout will be published by Kindle Press! I couldn't be more excited and I'm still sort of in shock.

I promised a run-down of my stats:

• I was in Hot & Trending 74% of the time. There were two stretches of seven days or more when I was in Hot & Trending for more than 170 hours (a week.) There were three days total when I wasn't in Hot & Trending at all, and the rest of the time I was in it for at least part of the day.

• By the end of the campaign, 41% of my page views came from people directed to my link and 59% came from people just visiting the site.

• I received around 1080 page views by the end. 

What worked?

First and foremost, I was lucky. Now, I have a long history of being unlucky when it comes to book marketing and publishing, so this is a really big break for me. I did a lot of things right, but so did a lot of other authors whose books didn't do as well.

As far as tangible things that worked, here's my list:

• The title: I didn't think about it at the time, but having a book called The Standout in a situation where it's competing with other books for nominations couldn't have hurt me. It's just asking to be noticed.
• The cover! My cover artist, Christa Holland at Paper and Sage is amazing and deserves a lot of credit. She designed a beautiful, noticeable cover that I believe got me a lot of page views.
• My visibility campaign: Candace at CBB Book Promotions got the ball rolling for me, and the first week-long stretch of Hot & Trending is due to her. I looked at it like this: One way or another, The Standout was getting published and I was simply doing my promotion pre-release. It worked, and a lot of people noticed The Standout.
• Facebook. I started by sending a message to 50 of my friends who I thought would be the most receptive to my Kindle Scout campaign. Several of them spontaneously posted for me. Later that week my mom and my husband posted for me. Towards the end of my campaign I had several more friends post for me, and I tried to space it out. I also posted on my own timeline twice, and every time I wrote a Kindle Scout Diary blog, I posted that too.
• Having a publishing history: I've already published several books on Amazon, and that seems to have helped, as many other Kindle Press authors can say the same. I made The Holdout free for two days during my campaign, it was featured on Pixel of Ink, and sales took off. Thank you Pixel of Ink!
• Putting forth my best effort with my book and author page:  I like to think I wrote a good book, and that the presentation is really professional. That's certainly what I was going for.

So there you have it. I hope that helps any of you Kindle Scout authors who may be in the beginning or middle of their campaigns. Good Luck!!!