by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
I finally got around to experimenting with doing a free promo. Naturally, I was interested in seeing if running this kind of a promo would boost sales of my other books…and also, I was just curious. I’ve seen a ton of free book promotions and hadn’t tried doing one myself.
So far I’ve run two…a very short one, and one that’s turning out to be longer than I anticipated.
What I’ve noticed:
You get a ton of reviews and a real look at who’s reading your books. They talk about what they like and don’t like. I like getting a snapshot of my readers and feel like I was casting the net wider to really get a better picture of my demographic.
You get a lot of visibility. As unbelievable as this sounds, I heard from two different people that I’d worked with, two different summers while I was in college. I hadn’t heard from these coworkers in twenty years…and they both happened to find me through the free book promo.
The sale does impact your other books’ sales. But don’t get too excited. This seems to vary. I know that my sales for the other books did show a slight uptick. One comment from a reviewer on Amazon for Progressive Dinner Deadly: Found this browsing around. I usually hesitate to buy self-pubbed vanity releases for obvious reasons but took a chance with the good reviews and free price. I sooooo enjoyed this. Good marketing because now I’m willing to pay for the rest!
So there we have proof of actual sales resulting from the promo….if she did indeed follow through with the purchases. :) (And please forgive the inclusion of a good review to make a point.)
You may not have as much control over how long your book is free as you’d like. Maybe you know something that I don’t, but the length of the sale might be somewhat out of your hands. The first time I tried this, I successfully ran a free promo for a couple of days by making the book free on Smashwords. I almost immediately took raised the price back up again on Smashwords. Amazon made the book free within 24 hours and then raised the price after 48 hours.
This time…the book is still free. I’ve raised the price on Smashwords (it’s been over a week now), and Amazon has not reflected the change. I’m guessing that somebody out there…Kobo, Apple, etc….hasn’t raised the price up yet and Amazon is still matching the free listing.
Update 11-16–This morning I see that the free ebook is now full price again. So Amazon finally either realized the book was no longer free at the online bookstore that prompted the sale, or else that bookstore (Kobo?) finally raised the price (although the price had changed at Smashwords long ago.)
Might be a better strategy if you have a couple of other books up for sale. Otherwise, you could be missing out on income. Jane Friedman touched on this during an interesting Reddit conversation:
It also helps if you have more than 1 book to sell—if you have, in fact, a series to sell. That way, you can use the first book as a loss leader (free or 99 cents), then charge more for the later books. But that only works if you prove yourself with readers on the first book.
What I haven’t noticed:
Others have noted that they saw particularly harsh reviews during free promotions—a common conclusion is that readers have little respect for a product they receive for free.
I haven’t seen this. Yes, I’ve gotten some harsh reviews during the free promos, but I’ve gotten some harsh reviews on a $6.99 Penguin ebook, too! I can’t say that I’ve noticed a difference. Either way….just build up your thick skin. I take anything helpful from a bad review that I can.
Have you ever run a free book promotion? How did it go? As a reader, have you ever downloaded free ebooks? What was the quality of the books you downloaded?
Image: Flickr—Klabusta’s Photostream
Elizabeth – Thanks for sharing what you learned from your free book promo. It sounds as though it’s definitely got some advantages. I have to think about how I’d work that in at some point. As Diane says, it’s probably most successful if one’s got several active titles out there…
Thanks so much for sharing your experience. I haven’t done the free thing yet, and since I won’t have another book out until April, I probably will wait until sometime after that point.
Also, I’m participating in Alex Cavanaugh’s Miss You Blogfest. You are named on my blog as one of the bloggers I would miss if you stopped blogging.
And this post today proves my point.
Happy Weekend!
Hi Elizabeth – how interesting to see how free affects things .. you’re such a good disseminator of information ..
The quote is an excellent example – I value your posts … cheers Hilary
If you do a free promo via Smashwords, you usually can count on MONTHS of lag time. And Amazon may never actually match the price, either. It all depends on which Smashwords partners Amazon decides to match.
But if you are willing to let things go that long, it can be a nice strategy.
Interesting information. Price-setting is out of my hands for Locked Within but my publisher often runs price promotions and free promotions for the Kindle editions, so I’ll be watching for the whole exposure and increased reviews when my turn comes around.
Hilary–Thanks for visiting. That whole thread on the Reddit writing community board was interesting.
Paul–I was truly amazed. That first free promo I ran, there were something like 25,000 downloads in the space of a very short period of time. So you’re talking about potentially widening your readership to an amazing degree.
Wow, really? If even a small fraction of those pick up the rest of your books, that’s a significant increase in sales.
Paul–I noticed a definite uptick for the sales of the other books…especially the following month. I think that’s because the readers who bought the other books took the time to read the freebie, enjoyed it, then bought the others the following month. So, not an *immediate* uptick. And not nearly in the tens of thousands! Part of that reason is because I think some readers see a free book and they just immediately download it. Might not be the genre they read, might not be something they’d even *enjoy*–but it was free. So the percentage who does buy the other books is the percentage who enjoy that genre to begin with. At least, this is what I’m guessing. :)
Sounds about right. I’m wondering about the benefits of timing other giveaways with a free ebook promotion? Sort of a “if you enjoy the ebook, buy a physical copy and I’ll throw in X”
Paul–I’m thinking that could work really well…if I could get around to putting my books up with CreateSpace..ha! But I could link it up with my traditional releases, possibly. Buy a trad book, get an .mobi file (self-pub) free.
Now there’s an idea. I’ve seen that used as a promotional tool with roleplaying games. Free pdf copies with a hard copy purchase.
I think it only works if the author has multiple books, because it does spark the sale of other books.
And with the I Miss You Blogfest today, I can safely say I would miss you, Elizabeth.
Thanks so much for this post, Elizabeth. There’s so much I don’t understand about book marketing but I think it’s true that running free promotions gets your name and book/series out there and I think the more it’s out there, the better, and I think you’re right, making one book a loss leader increases sales of the others.
One of my friends told me that she won’t do free promotions anymore because she hates the one-star reviews that follow. None of us like them, but one thing I’ve noticed is that whenever I get a one-star, it’s usually from a reader who hasn’t really read the book and doesn’t normally read my sub-genre anyway. And I know I worry about it: the other night I had a dream that my book was 0.62 out of 5 stars (don’t ask me how I got the .62 …)
Who knows what the giveaway phenomenon will become in a couple of years—Scott Nicholson and JA Konrath boast that they’ve given away millions of books, and yet they are making millions. Does the giveaway create more readers? Does it lower the price of all books? Will books all be free eventually?
But right now I think the giveaway exposes readers to different genres and gives writers all sorts of ideas.
Paul–Interesting! I hadn’t seen that. It’s definitely food for thought for the future.
Diane–An important point!
And I’d miss your Spunk on a Stick/Circle of Friends blog, Diane!
Margot–Yes, I think it’s much better if there’s at least one other book available. Because otherwise it gives you this slightly sick feeling to see how many sales you’re missing out on…
Carol–Might be a good release day strategy for your April release.
You’re too sweet! And Carol, yours is one of the ones I’d miss. What would I do without a tiki hut to escape to?
The Daring Novelist–I would be *okay* with months of lagtime, but not really delighted with it. I’m too interested in product control to be able to wait too long.
Susan–I think for discoverability, free promos work really well.
That does sound like a nightmare! Yes, these poor reviews really do sting–but they also show that we haven’t just gotten all our friends/family/employees/neighbors together to write rave reviews. :) They show our books are real books with real reviews. Some people just aren’t wild about cozy mysteries, some don’t like my characters, some don’t like the way I write. I can understand that.
I think if you have a huge backlist, then you can *always* run at least a couple of books free at all times. I’m not sure in a genre like mine if I could ever get downloads as big as Konrath and others get, but they could definitely result in increased sales for other titles.
Exposing readers to other genres is key! Getting crossover readers really can widen our reader base.
I ran a free promo once on Smashwords for a week and Sony kept it free for several months!
As for reviews, sometimes I feel like dropping to my knees and begging. It’s like pulling teeth.
I’m glad you brought this up, as I have been thinking about doing a giveaway (at my expense) on Kindle, Nook & Kobo. This has provided much food for thought. (For the curious: here’s the homepage.)
Harsh reviews seem to happen no matter what.
If I do self pub next year, I’m seriously considering having my first book out for free. A lot of people have had success with this strategy to draw in readers and that’s what it’s all about!
Great information! Thank you for sharing this!
Laura–I know what you mean! I think there’s just a lag time before people give any. I believe it was several weeks before reviews started to come in on two of mine and my latest release has no reviews at all. I guess if I were smart, I’d send review copies to Amazon reviewers, but there are only so many hours in the day!
Jim–I think it’s a great way to get exposure for our books. Good luck with it!
Alex–They sure do. I think what makes people think that it’s connected to free promos is that the sheer volume of reviews increases so much. This means that there are more good reviews…but there are more bad reviews, too.
Suzanne–Thanks for coming by!
Jemi–It can be a great way to get reviews and visibility and a solid ranking on Amazon. I think my only concern would be the length of time it goes free…probably a short sale would be all that would be necessary to get the book in the spotlight.
I have found that giveaways via the Amazon KDP program has really helped launch the first two books in my mystery series, City of Darkness and City of Light. I agree with the thinking that it’s most helpful if you have a series – if you get them hooked on the first free one they often to do seem to come back for more and I have seen upticks in “Darkness” both when “Light” is free and for as along as a month afterwards – and vice versa. Three other things I’ve noticed, and note that I’m speaking exclusively of Amazon : 1) The first two times you run a free promo you get the greatest number of downloads and thus the greatest bump in sales. After that the effect is muted. 2) Two days seems to be the sweet spot for length of a free promo – it takes a day for the wave of downloads to build but it begins to taper on day three and 3) While bad reviews sting, the Amazon algorithms are more affected by the number of reviews as they are the qualiy of reviews. In other words 20 five star reviews won’t help you as much as 200 reviews that range from one star to five. They’re looking for evidence people are reading your book, not just that you’ve strong armed friends and family into writing good reviews.
I’m being a bit of a hardhead about it. For my debut novel, BABY GRAND, I wouldn’t take advantage of any of KDP Select’s free promotion days. Frankly, I just don’t understand the concept of giving books away for free en masse. You make some valid points, but I think it does a disservice to the industry. I think it trains readers to EXPECT books will be available for free if they wait long enough. Perhaps I’ll change my mind one day, but for now I just don’t think $2.99 is a lot to charge for novel-length fiction. We’ll see…
Dina–That’s definitely another side to it. For me, it’s a visibility experiment and I think most savvy readers see what writers are doing–that they’ve got a free sample, so to speak, but it’s a full-length free sample (*hoping* this is what readers are thinking, anyway..ha!) I don’t blame you at all for not wanting to do it for a debut novel–there’s something special about a first launch and running free promos could be dispiriting for a new release. Consider it when you’ve got book 3 out there and want to hook new readers to the series.
I didn’t go through KDP Select, but I’m not sure I made that clear in my post! I had another question on Twitter about the same thing. I didn’t like the idea of committing solely to Amazon, so I just did the price-matching free promo, using Smashwords.
That’s fascinating. I can see how giving away books in a series helps. That way you whet the reader’s appetite for your stories!
Julie–I think it can be a great way to hook new readers, for sure.
Kim–Thanks so much for your thoughts on this! I did notice that I had more downloads the first time I ran the promo, despite the fact that it was a shorter sale.
And a great point about Amazon’s mysterious algorithms. I wasn’t aware that the number of reviews factored into it, but that certainly makes sense–especially when the reviews indicate that there are “real people” reading our books.
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