Setting Up a Free Promo on KDP Select

Enrollment requirements

Free Book Promotions are only available to books enrolled in KDP Select, which requires 90-day rolling exclusivity — your eBook can't be sold or distributed anywhere else (including your own website, other retailers, or as a bundled giveaway) while enrolled. This is an all-or-nothing tradeoff: you gain KU eligibility and free-promo days, but you give up presence on Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and similar platforms for that title.

Once enrolled, you get 5 free days to use however you like within each 90-day term — as five separate single days, or grouped into a multi-day stretch. Enrollment auto-renews every 90 days unless you opt out during a short cancellation window, so mark your calendar if you're planning to go wide with a title once its current term ends.

Scheduling the promo

From your KDP Bookshelf, open the title, go to Promotions, and select Free Book Promotion. You'll pick a start and end date (Pacific time is the reference zone for when the promo actually flips on and off). Promos typically need to be scheduled a few days in advance, so don't wait until the morning you want it to start.

During the promo window, your book's price automatically shows as $0.00 in every marketplace where you've made it available — you don't need to separately zero out pricing. Your book returns to its normal listed price automatically the moment the promo window ends, with no action needed on your part.

Lining up promo sites to match your dates

A free listing on Amazon alone won't move much volume — the real leverage comes from getting your free days featured on book-deal newsletter sites (Freebooksy, BookBub, BargainBooksy, and similar) that email their subscriber lists on the day your book is free. These sites require submission in advance — often 1–3 weeks lead time for the paid, higher-traffic slots — so the promo-site bookings should be made before you lock your free-promo dates on KDP, not after.

Line up your submission deadlines first, then schedule your KDP free days to land on the dates those sites confirm.

Most submission forms ask for your book's current review count and average rating, genre, and a short pitch — have these ready ahead of time so you're not scrambling to fill out five different site forms with slightly different requirements in the same afternoon.

What to expect during the promo

Expect your Amazon sales rank (both overall and category rank) to climb sharply as free downloads roll in — this is the actual value of the promo, since a high rank increases organic visibility even after the book returns to paid. Free downloads earn $0 royalty by definition, and depending on your genre and how the newsletter placement performs, KENP reads from Kindle Unlimited borrowers may also tick up a few days after the promo as readers who grabbed the free copy get around to starting it.

It's normal for the biggest single-day download spike to land on whichever day your highest-traffic promo site email actually goes out, rather than day one of the promo by default — plan your strongest placement for the day you most want the visibility peak to hit, not necessarily the first day.

Common mistakes that blunt a free promo's impact

The most common error is running a free promo with no reviews yet and no back matter linking to the rest of a series or a newsletter signup — the promo generates downloads, but there's nothing in place to convert those downloads into anything lasting. A close second is scheduling the promo before confirming any newsletter placements at all, ending up with a free listing that only reaches people already browsing Amazon's free chart, which is a much smaller and less predictable audience than a dedicated newsletter blast.

Free promos for a series versus a standalone

A free promo works differently depending on what you're promoting. Running book 1 of a series free is one of the highest-leverage moves available to an indie author, since a reader who enjoys a free book 1 often goes on to buy the rest of the series at full price — effectively making the free download an acquisition cost rather than lost revenue. A standalone novel doesn't have this backend to recoup against, so a free promo on a standalone is purely a rank-and-visibility play, useful for building review count and category presence but without the multiplied payoff a series funnel provides. This is one of the strongest arguments for keeping at least a series-starter enrolled in Select even if you take later books in the series wide.

Checking your book is actually ready before you promote it

A free promo amplifies whatever's already true about a book's listing — a strong cover and description convert a rank spike into lasting discoverability, while a weak product page just burns through a limited promotional tool without much lasting benefit. Before locking in dates, it's worth a final check: does the cover read clearly as a thumbnail at the small size shoppers actually browse at, does the book description hook a reader in the first two lines before Amazon truncates it, and is the categorization already dialed in so a rank spike lands in a category that actually reflects the book. Fixing any of these after the promo has already run doesn't recover the missed opportunity from that specific push.

It's also worth confirming your book's page is actually live and correctly showing as free in every marketplace you expect before your promo-site emails go out — occasionally a marketplace lags behind others in reflecting a scheduled price change, and catching that a few hours into the promo rather than checking proactively at the start means lost visibility during your highest-traffic window.