Michael R. Hicks's Blog, page 20

$20 Giveaway Contest!

Since it turned out to be impractical to hold contests on Facebook without either spending a bunch of money on an app or getting my butt tossed into Facebook jail, we'll just hold 'em here!

So, this one is a continuation of what we had started to do on Facebook, although I'm gonna change it just a bit to suit this venue (and I'm still gonna ask you to help out a bit with social media sharing as part of the contest).

Here's all ya gotta do: just post a comment here on…anything you feel like…and, if you'd be so kind, click the social media sharing buttons at the bottom of the post (well, the ones for which you have accounts, at least!) to help spread the word about my books so my family doesn't have to eat mac & cheese for dinner all year.

At around 6PM EST tonight, I'll close the contest and announce the winner, who'll get a $20 gift certificate to Amazon or Barnes & Noble (winner's choice). And, as a consolation prize for the inconvenience of having to sort of do this twice for some of you, I'm tossing in a second certificate for $10!

So, post a comment here and good luck – we'll see you at 6PM tonight!

P.S. BTW – if you haven't gotten your free copy of IN HER NAME: EMPIRE, now's a good time to grab one…but only after you post a comment here!

P.P.S. DON'T BE ALARMED if your comment doesn't show up here right away! I have to manually approve first-time commenters (cuts down on the spam), and will be doing that periodically throughout the day. So fear not, your comment/vote won't be misplaced!

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Get Inspired

As you may know if you've read my posts for a while, my wife Jan and I have run a few half-marathons. We don't consider ourselves "runners," but just really enjoy the experience.

Our last one was in September 2011 at Virginia Beach, when Jan's knees sort of fell apart on her (I did a post on that here). After that, we've done very little running, and very little exercise of any kind.

It's really easy to fall off the wagon, isn't it? And it can happen with anything: a passion you have, a hobby, a job, even relationships.

So, we've sort of been hibernating fitness-wise most of the winter. Some of that was because legitimate reasons, some of it was just not bloody feeling like doing anything about it.

But the other day we were out on the Baltimore-Annapolis trail near where we live, volunteering at a water station for a marathon being run on the trail, and that's where Jan and I both got some inspiration to get our butts back in gear and get moving again. While we wouldn't have run in that particular race (it's a bit cold for us, yet!), watching those men and women out there made us want to get back into it again. In short, those people inspired us.

There were young folks, including a number of cadets from the Naval Academy, up through some folks older than my parents, chugging right along through 26.2 miles.

Now, the only full marathon I ever plan to enter is the Marine Corps Marathon, as 26.2 miles is just a bit too far to contemplate. But I'm up for 13.1, a half marathon, which was described once as "half the distance, twice the fun." And you know, it's really true!

But the key is, get inspired! If you feel like you're just sort of settling into the blahs about something, whatever it may be, consciously look around for something to do, see, or get involved in that will inspire you and rekindle your passion. Don't just give it up or let what you enjoy become a chore!

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The Perils Of Vanity Press Publishing

I recently received an email from an author who wrote to me wanting to know why he wasn't seeing a bump in sales from the novel that he'd recently published for the Kindle. So, I figured I'd take a look and see if I could come up with any pithy words of wisdom, but discovered that he'd fallen into the trap of the good ol' "vanity press".

Pulling up the book on Amazon, three things immediately caught my eye. The first was the image of the cover. As I've harped on a number of times, and readers can likely attest, if the cover doesn't catch the reader's eye, the chances of them going further down the path to buying the book dry up rapidly. The cover on this book, which dealt with a pretty intense sci-fi topic, looked – literally – like a grade schooler had drawn it with pencil and overlaid the title and by-line in text with Microsoft Paint. If the title text hadn't been there, I would have thought the book was some sort of kid's comic art thing.

Note that I am not dissing the author. I am simply pointing out a brutal fact: good cover art will help sell books. Crappy cover art will do the opposite. Like it or not, a good cover is the first step to getting a reader's attention, which is essential if you're going to sell books (readers, back me up here!). So if you can't do it yourself, pay a starving artist to do it for you. There are tons of talented folks out there in places like DeviantART. Seek and ye shall find.

The second thing was the price. The digital list price (which is essentially the base retail price) was $9.99, which Amazon was discounting to $7.69. In this day and age, almost no one is going to pay this much for a book by an unknown author, especially one that has a cover like this one does. Why should any reader pay that much, when there are tons of great books out there for prices ranging from free to $4.99? Heck, I've given up on some of my favorite authors from the Big 6 publishers because I refuse to pay the ridiculous prices they're demanding, which are sometimes more than the paperback price. And an unknown indie trying to charge this much and make any significant moolah? Good luck, my friend.

Now, authors debate all day and night about what the "right" price is for a book: $0.99, $1.99, $2.99, $4.99 – whatever, take your pick. But I can tell you what is NOT the right price, and that's seven, eight, nine or more bucks for an author who has yet to develop a significant (by that, I mean somewhere in the thousands) readership.

The third thing was that the catalog entry for this book had no blurb, no description of the story it contained. All it had was a brief author bio listed under editorial reviews. This is an absolute killer. Who's going to buy a book that doesn't even have a description on the catalog page, especially with the first two strikes against it?

This is when I happened to look at who was listed as the publisher: AuthorHouse. The flashing red alarm beacon went off.

AuthorHouse is what many of us snobby author types call a vanity press. Why? Because you, the author, pay someone else to publish your book. There are a number of these companies around, although many of them have consolidated in recent years. They offer a variety of "packages" to help you publish your book.

In the case of AuthorHouse, that ranges from $349 for a basic ebook package to – as best I could tell – a whopping $8,499 for their "Showcase" package. There was also another one, just an email marketing campaign to reach "10 million opted-in e-mail recipients" for a paltry $9,996 (one-time send, and you apparently don't actually get the list, it seems like they just send the email out to their own list).

But one of the things they apparently don't do (at least from what I could tell) is actually provide editing services as part of these packages, which is the most important thing your book needs.

Holy crap. Listen, here's the deal. If you've got that kind of money to blow, send it to my PayPal account and then go watch Spongebob Squarepants. Your book sales will be about the same as spending it on one of these publishing deals, except I'll gladly make you some chocolate chip pancakes that you can enjoy while watching Spongebob. Seriously, if you've got that amount of money, stick it in a CD or something and let it work for you. You've got some work of your own to do, and it's something none of these vanity press places can or will do for you.

You can do by yourself just about everything any of these companies can do and reap three vital benefits: control of critical things like pricing, getting a bigger cut of the royalties, and saving your freakin' money. If you publish direct via Amazon's Kindle publishing platform, Barnes & Noble's Pubit service, and Smashwords, you'll have 95% of ebook market covered; for print use CreateSpace or Lightning Source to get your books to the big online retailers (note: forget bookstores, you can't offer print books at a sufficient margin for them to make the sort of profit they want).

For those things you may not feel like you can do yourself, like cover art or formatting, or even the whole process of taking your manuscript and getting it published, there are whole cottage industries out there with people who can help you do those things a la carte, and most will cost you a lot less (sometimes even free) than even the $300-400 base package cost offered by a lot of these services, and you'll still have full control and a full cut of the royalties.

"But hey, these vanity press companies do press releases and other stuff!" If you want to do press releases, you can do those yourself, free. Personally, though, I've tried them and I don't think they'll do a thing unless, like any other part of your marketing strategy, you do them consistently over a long period of time. That's what I do on Twitter and Facebook (and should be doing on Google+), and with work and time it's paid off very handsomely. But that's the thing: marketing and promotion is something you, the author, have to work on every single day. None of the stuff that these places offer will ever take the place of that, no matter how much money you shovel in their direction.

Listen, I know several authors personally who've locked themselves into deals with these companies where their books are priced way out of the market, and they're stuck until the terms of the agreement run out. On top of that, they'll have to sell thousands of books to have any hope of even recouping the cost of what they spent on their publishing package. It's really outrageous.

To me, that's really the bottom line, and why these things are called "vanity press" – if you want your book published, you pay somebody to do it and it's done. You spent a bunch of money to "become an author". Congratulations.

But if you want to do this for a business, to make real money at it, what you don't want is to a) have to pay a bucket of money up front after you've done most of the hard work writing the book to begin with, and b) to have someone else skimming a big chunk of whatever royalty you might get from what are almost always grossly overpriced books (which, by the way, won't sell worth a dang because nobody is willing to pay that much past your immediate family and friends).

So, when it comes to going with one of these places like AuthorHouse, my recommendation is, as Arnold Schwarzenegger might say, "Don't do dat." Do your homework on the web about true self-publishing, figure out those things like cover art that you need someone else to do, and spend your precious cash on those things while reaping the greatest long-term financial rewards for yourself.

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Should Amazon Charge Authors To Publish For Kindle?

I actually hadn't planned to post anything about this, but a number of folks have asked me about it and I figured I'd blurt out my opinion, for what little it's worth.

By way of background, this discussion stemmed from author Rob Guthrie's post, Amazon Charging For Digital Publication? and a follow-up post. And let me be clear on one thing right up front: I mean no disrespect to Rob or anyone else. This is one of those "differing opinions" things. So if you agree, great. If you don't, that's great, too! Just be nice, either way.

Anyway, the premise is that Amazon should charge authors a steep fee (Rob suggests $500 for the first book and $100 for any subsequent titles) to publish their books for Kindle. Right now, the process is entirely free. The premise of the argument has two major planks: one, it would purportedly make Amazon a guaranteed profit up front and that it's almost inevitable that Amazon will do this, anyway; and two, it would weed out a lot of the crappy books that indies publish (I'm an indie, so I can say that).

I'm sorry, but I think the cases for both of those arguments are failboats.

On the "it would be in Amazon's best interests profit-wise" to charge $$$ up front, many of the arguments on the pro side revolve around how much Amazon pays for infrastructure and support costs vs. what they might be making from book sales. Basically, are they making a net profit from KDP-published (KDP is Amazon's publishing arm for Kindle) Kindle books.

While there's no question that there are costs involved with digital book publishing, storage, and distribution via KDP, the undeniable fact is that none of us outside of Amazon's budget department have a flipping clue about what any of those numbers really are. And if I hear the old "Amazon is selling at a loss now, and has been for years!" thing again, I'm going to hurl. If that was true for as many things as I've heard, Amazon would have gone bankrupt before they moved their operations out of Jeff Bezos' garage. Or maybe that was Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Whatever.

Yes, storage and distribution costs money, but when you take into account the byzantine rules of business operations like tax deductions (I can't imagine how many millions Amazon writes off), discounts for services like the 3G for Whispernet connectivity (i.e., I'm sure Amazon doesn't pay the telecom providers what WE pay for data transfer), etc., this whole argument becomes entirely academic because we simply don't have any data, and can't even speculate intelligently.

As far as the profit goes, charging $500 up front would certainly be nice for Amazon's coffers. But let's see how the numbers work again. Here's how many books Amazon would have to sell at different price points to gain that same $500 in terms of gross revenue, vice net profit. Sure, you can argue that there would have to be more sales to account for $500 net profit (which would be what's left after all the operations costs are subtracted out), which is true, but let's just stick with this because we actually know the numbers (and this only applies to KDP titles at regular prices, not the Big 6, freebies, etc.):

At $0.99: 777 (65% x $0.99)

At $2.98: 258 (65% x $2.98)

At $2.99: 502* (70% x $2.99 – $0.10)

At $9.99: 173* (70% x $9.99 – $0.10)

At $10.00: 77 (65% x $10.00 and higher)

* I'm assuming an arbitrary delivery cost of $0.10 that goes to Amazon for books in the $2.99-$9.99 range at the 70% royalty option. The bigger the file, the higher the delivery cost. This also means that, in the 70% royalty realm, the author is picking up at least part of the tab for getting the book to the reader.

To some authors, those may look like big numbers. But they're really not, in terms of the scale that Amazon is looking at. The books that are in the top 100 are selling well over a thousand copies a day. Let's take a specific example: John Locke sold a million of his $0.99 ebooks in five months. Amazon made $640,000 from those million book sales, and wrote off every aspect of the operating costs to store and deliver them. And yet we're supposed to believe that they didn't make a net profit? Pardon my skepticism. I haven't had my coffee yet this morning.

The most important thing is that all those books will continue making money for Amazon and the author *forever*. $500 up front is peanuts in the long game. Even books with low sales numbers, over time, are going to make some money.

As for item #2, that making authors pay a steep surcharge is going to help filter out the crap…it's just false logic. For many years, tons of authors paid lots of money, far more than $500, to have garbage printed by vanity press services. Many still do, with some folks paying thousands for the privilege of having a garage filled with boxes of horrible books. The only thing such a surcharge guarantees is that those folks who can't afford $500 won't be publishing with Amazon. That would probably account for a lot of undiscovered talent out there, people who don't have $500 to blow, plus – in Rob's hypothetical model – another $100 for every additional title.

And the assertion that "If someone's serious, they'll find a way to come up with the money" is, again, false logic. Just because you're determined doesn't mean you have any talent. In my career at NSA, I saw lots of people who were extremely determined rise through the ranks, but many of them couldn't find their way out of a paper sack with a blowtorch and a pair of scissors. By contrast, there were many incredibly talented people who, because they were focused on the job and the mission (like most authors good authors are focused on their writing) despised jumping through hoops and never rose as high as they should have in the great scheme of things.

This hypothetical model is the same. There are probably more than a few authors out there now, making money and pleasing readers, who wouldn't be if they'd been confronted with a major monetary obstacle to being published. Heck, I probably wouldn't have published had such a system been in place, and for me, writing as a career never would have happened. Or, authors might say, "Screw Amazon! I'll publish with someone else." And that is something that Amazon does not want to have happen.

Anyway, this is another one of those things that authors will argue about until the sun blows up, but the bottom line is that – pro, con, or somewhere in between – none of us really know. It's all pointless speculation, and the word count people are putting into these posts (I just blew a thousand words on this post) and comments are words that we should be putting into the chapters of our next books…

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Should Self-Published Authors Pay For Advertising?

The other day I happened across a post from an author who had spent several hundred dollars in a single month on Facebook ads to help sell his books. I wanted to stick a pen in my eyeball.

I'm probably going to take a bit of crap for this post, but what the heck. Listen, there are some folks who are experts who can pull a rabbit out of the hat with targeted marketing using Facebook ads and other types of advertising. I've also seen some strategies like Jeff Bennington came up with that look pretty slick and, at least in his case, have certainly worked. However, as a general rule, most paid advertising campaigns don't bring a good return on investment. Or, put it another way, you can promote your book more effectively through social media – for free.

The hundreds of dollars you can sink into Facebook ads or Google Adwords – and yes, I've slit my wrists and bled money out on both of those, and others – simply aren't going to translate into enough book sales to make them worthwhile. Buying banner ads and spots on various web sites is popular, but because it's popular, it's getting more expensive on a lot of sites. In some cases, I saw price tags of several hundred dollars. You might experience a spike in sales while the ad is running, or you might not. But then your gig is up unless you cough up more money. Did you really make enough sales from that ad to justify the cost?

"But hey, I did better than break even!" You glare at me indignantly. I get that a lot.

Listen, if your writing is your business (and if you're spending hundreds of bucks on advertising, you're definitely in a business!), breaking even shouldn't be in your vocabulary. You should be out to build up a big readership base, have one or two loss leaders (books that sell at a steep discount or are given away), and maximize your profit margin on everything else. If you're doing this for a living, you don't have time or money for things that only provide marginal returns on investment. Books from indie authors aren't sold with Facebook ads or Google Adwords, they're sold by word of mouth, either yours or your readers. Ads can sometimes help, but unless you really know what you're doing and have money to burn, I advise caution.

Instead, consider spending your buckazoids on social media tools like Tweet Adder that keep on giving, helping you build a community of interest on Twitter. Or spend it on classes or books to get an education how to use social media effectively. Heck, spend it on cover art or editing.

Just my two cents.

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Adjusting To Being A Full-Time Author – Part 5

Death and taxes. You know the saying. Well, I'm here to warn you that, if you're not careful when you make the transition to writing full-time (or any other form of self-employment), one might quickly lead to the other. Figuratively speaking, of course.

Here's what I mean. When you're working for a company or the government, Uncle Sam and your state normally take their cut right off the top before you get your paycheck. Sure, you have to juggle standard deductions and some other stuff, but the bottom line is that most or all of what you owe gets vacuumed up first.

Not so with your book royalties, especially in what I'll term your "breakout year", when you go from maybe making a little to really making a lot like I did in 2011. I'll give you a little bit of advice that sounds obvious in hindsight, but that I wish I would have had someone beat into my skull:

Find a good tax consultant who has experience with small businesses and the self-employed, and have them put a tax strategy together in the first calendar quarter when you're paid royalties of more than a couple thousand dollars.

Ironically, it is much more important to do this right away if your royalties suddenly zoom upward.

Why? Because you will find an extremely unpleasant surprise waiting for you come tax time. Yes, you made a load of moolah, and you probably went a little gonzo spending it. "Hey, but I've set aside enough for taxes. No biggie!"

That's where we get to what nature photographer John Shaw once said is Rule of Life #1: Don't be dumb.

Remember that the retailer or distributor (Amazon, B&N, etc.) just forks over your money. They do not withhold any taxes. Zip. You're responsible for figuring all that stuff out on your own.

In addition to federal and state or other local taxes, you're also most likely going to be in for the good ol' self-employment tax, which can add another 15.3% to your tax burden (with all the attendant bazillion variables that affect the exact amount and percentage that you would actually have to pay). This is a chunk of money that essentially covers your cut for Social Security and Medicare. You have to pay this as an employee of a regular company or the government, but it comes as a surprise to a lot of people who are just starting out in the self-employed realm because, like regular taxes, these deductions were taken off the top by your company before you got your paycheck.

Another factor is retirement. You're responsible for that now. Yeah, you. There's no company annuity, no retirement office, nobody looking out for your future but you.

Now, the good news here is that if you set up something like an LLC or other qualifying business, you can establish an SEP-IRA, which is a great vehicle tax-wise. Similar in many ways to a 401k, the money you put into it can be deducted from your gross income, and the interest grows tax-free. So check with your tax consultant to see if this is a good option for you.

And that brings me to the last item to beware of: pulling out your retirement funds. There are going to be cases when you'll want to cash in your funds. Just make sure you get a tax consultant to give you a projection of your tax liability when you do. With many funds, if you withdraw before a certain age you'll be hit with a large (10% seems to be common) penalty, on top of the income tax you'll owe. If you're pulling out a lot of money, it will likely push you into a higher tax bracket than normal. That can add up quickly, and that's not a surprise you want to have come tax time.

Another thing about the higher tax bracket: if your royalties come flooding in, be prepared to pay more in taxes than you think, because a ton of new money could easily push you into a higher tax bracket.

Again, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of ongoing dialogue between yourself and your tax consultant. I would touch base with him or her every quarter. Why? Because, unlike a typical salaried job, your income is likely going to vary a lot (sometimes by as much as 400%, possibly more) from month to month, and your tax burden, which you'll typically pay on a quarterly basis, is going to become a moving target. Your tax consultant can help you make sure that you're withholding close to the right amount as the year progresses, so when the following April comes you're not going to be slammed with an ugly surprise.

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Foreword of From Chaos Born

With the release of the next In Her Name novel, From Chaos Born, now only a few weeks away, I wanted to give you a clearer idea of what the story's about.

Herewith is the draft of the foreword, which is intended to do just that…

While this book is certainly part of the In Her Name series, it represents something a bit different from the previously published books. Those volumes speak to the war between the human race and the ancient Kreelan Empire, telling the tale of the century-long conflict between the two civilizations and that conflict's eventual resolution.

With From Chaos Born, we're about to turn back the clock roughly one hundred thousand years, focusing our attention on the Kreelan Homeworld and its handful of interstellar Settlements. There are no humans in this story: here on Earth, Neanderthals walked among our ancient homo sapiens ancestors, and stone-tipped spears were still a rather novel invention.

The Kreelan race, by contrast, was already ancient, the rise and fall of countless civilizations dating back a further four hundred thousand years, divided into four distinct Ages. A balance of power emerged among the seven ancient martial orders, the priesthoods, that allowed a race uniquely tailored for war to survive against itself. They were born, lived, and died in a path of life, the Way, that was defined and taught by the warrior priests and priestesses.

But they no longer worshipped the ancient gods, for those had been cast aside after a great cataclysm at the end of the Second Age that took their race to the very edge of extinction. In the bloody equilibrium that was at last achieved after that devastation, war, largely kept at a primitive level, meant life, even as it brought death.

It was a time of chaos without end.

But in what later would be determined as the singular event that would bring to a close the Fourth Age and herald the beginning of the Fifth, a girl child was born to the master of a great city and his consort. The child was unlike any other who had ever lived, for instead of black hair and black talons, her hair was white as pure snow, and her talons, the long and sharp nails at the ends of her fingers, were a fiery crimson.

Her name was Keel-Tath, and she was destined to unite her race and found an empire that would, at its height, span ten thousand suns across the galaxy.

From Chaos Born is her story. But it is only the beginning…

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Initial Revisions Of FROM CHAOS BORN Are Done!

This isn't the final cover art!

I'm happy to announce that the initial revisions for the next new novel of the IN HER NAME series, FROM CHAOS BORN, is done!

This novel is the start of a series of books that will tell the story of how the Kreelan Empire was founded. So if you enjoyed learning about their culture and history in the other books, you should like this one!

As for the story, I won't give out any spoilers, but will say that it's probably closer to a fantasy/adventure tale than science fiction, much like IN HER NAME: EMPIRE.

I hope to have the manuscript off to the editors this afternoon, and the cover art sorted out soon. With luck, I'm hoping to publish it for ebook formats near the end of this month.

Stay tuned!

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IN HER NAME Trilogy Free On Kindle For Valentine's Day

An Epic Space Opera

To celebrate Valentine's Day this year, the IN HER NAME Omnibus Edition will be free in all the Amazon Kindle Stores today and tomorrow!

If you're looking for a great book for yourself or someone you love, grab this one. While it may not seem like it on the surface, it's fitting to have a promotion for this particular book for Valentine's Day.

Why? Because, more than anything else, this trilogy-in-one (comprising the standalone novels EMPIRE, CONFEDERATION, and FINAL BATTLE) is a very intense love story.

But if you're not all that into romance, that's okay: there's plenty of action, adventure, and political intrigue to keep you occupied!

This book currently has over 200 reader reviews on Amazon US, with 90% of those being 4- and 5-star.

So, grab your free copy while you can, and be sure to tell your friends!

Amazon US
Amazon UK
Amazon DE
Amazon FR
Amazon IT
Amazon ES

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Managing Author Expectations For Non-Paid Book Promotions

I've read several author blogs lately where people have expressed disappointment with results from Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (DTP) Select program or other venues where the author can give a book(s) away for free. I wanted to give my impressions of my own experiences with freebies to help authors find ways of getting the most leverage out of them.

Freebies, regardless of the method or channel through which you offer them, are neither "bad" nor "good". It's a promotional tool that, like any other tool, has strengths and limitations. There are two cases to look at: one for an author who only has a single book out, and one where the author has multiple books, some of which are likely part of one or more series.

The Single-Book Author

Let's get something straight right off the bat: just because you've written and published a book doesn't mean you're going to be the next Amanda Hocking. Unlike John Locke, Joe Konrath, and a number of other bestselling authors who have either paid their dues in the publishing industry or already had an in-depth business background, I consider her a genuine phenomenon. She won the lottery, and her success is not directly replicable.

If you wrote your book with the intent of eventually writing as a career, consider your first Great American Novel – and probably your first three or four – like the drawings or paintings an artist creates to build their portfolio. While your first book may indeed earn you some money, its main value is in helping you build up a readership over time that will nag you constantly for your next book, and the one after that, etc.

"So you think I should just give away my first book for free? But…but…my effort deserves to be rewarded!" It will be if you stick with it. But your first book is just that: your first. You're not going to be making $300,000 a year and join the Kindle Million Club with one book. Take the long view and do everything you can to get it into as many readers' hands as possible (this assumes you've had someone edit the hell out of it, it has good cover art, and a good blurb that draws potential readers in to read a sample) while you're working on the next one, which is where you'll really start building your paid sales.

Amazon's KDP Select is a great compromise for a first book, because you can alternate between offering it free (5 days out of 90) and paid (the other 85 days). And while I've become disenchanted for various reasons with Smashwords, that's still an excellent venue for free book offerings, because aside from direct sales, they feed all the big retailers, including Barnes & Noble and Amazon (note: while you can select Amazon as a retailer, I don't know for certain if books you list for free on Smashwords will show up for free on Amazon, but they definitely will on other retailer sites).

For those authors who have one book and have been disappointed in sales through KDP Select, the bottom line is that your readership is still in its infancy. You have to have hundreds or thousands of existing fans to create enough word of mouth, fanned by consistent promotional efforts through social media, to sustain sales in significant volume. Most of the time after you put your book on a free promotion, you'll see a spike in sales after the book goes back to paid status. But it might not be a big spike, and it probably won't last for long. You shouldn't expect it to until your following reaches critical mass.

It's impossible to predict exactly when that will happen. But to give you something to use for comparison, I published IN HER NAME in 2008, but hardly did any promotional work other than chatting in a couple forums. Even at that, enough people liked that book and the next two (plus splitting the original one into a trilogy) that when I wrote the next one, SEASON OF THE HARVEST, early in 2011 and worked my butt off promoting it, my sales exploded.

Part of that explosion, I'm convinced, was because I'd been giving IN HER NAME: EMPIRE, the first novel in my bestselling sci-fi/fantasy series, away for free for a while. I'd also built up my Facebook following (5,000 at the time, although I've actually pared that down for various reasons) and had about two thousand (now almost 20,000) followers on Twitter. And when those readers found out I'd published my next book, they went out and bought it. And the spike in initial sales drove HARVEST up into the bestseller charts, where it stayed in the top 20 of both the horror and sci-fi categories throughout the summer.

So, the bottom line for your first book: it's not a profit generator, it's a reader grabber. If you make some money from it, great. But the main benefit it can give you is to build your following of readers who will eagerly await your next book, which they'll happily buy (if you don't overprice it). And the one after that, and after that.

The Author With A List

If you've got a list of titles, which ideally includes at least one series, freebies are gold. The basic rationale is the same as I indicated above, except now you have paid titles that you can lead your eager new readers to. Of the almost 150,000 books my readers grabbed in 2011, I'd say around 60,000 were freebies. Most of those were copies of EMPIRE, the first in my IN HER NAME series, but that also included around 10,000 of the first IN HER NAME trilogy and 15,000 free copies of HARVEST that went out the door as part of the KDP Select program over the course of two and three free days, respectively (I haven't used the rest of the five days for each book yet).

Far from saturating the market, those KDP Select freebies drove paid sales back up into the 200 rankings in the Kindle store for a while for both books. HARVEST doesn't have great hang time, so it fell off the charts in about two weeks (note: different books seem to have different hang times on the charts, regardless of your efforts at promotion – wierd!). But the IN HER NAME trilogy is right around 1,500 overall in the Kindle store as I write this a month later, and is still in the top 30 of three categories.

The other books of the IN HER NAME series got dragged back up, too. Not nearly as high, but significantly better than before I gave away that big pile of freebies.

In the meantime, EMPIRE (book 1 of the series) is free just about everywhere: on Amazon, B&N, my web site, iTunes, Smashwords, etc. I tell people to download it, read it, and send it to their friends if they like it. Because a lot of people do like it, and those who do are either going to buy book 2 of the series (CONFEDERATION) or the trilogy collection. Ka-ching. Happy reader, happy not-starving-for-another-day author.

Be aware, however, that not all books are going to have this draft effect with freebies. I also have book 4 of the IN HER NAME series, FIRST CONTACT, in KDP Select. While giving it away has helped sales somewhat, and I've done it twice now, the number of downloads hasn't been earth-shattering, and the effect on paid sales hasn't been that significant. There are other forces at work there that I haven't yet been able to pin down.

Also, while I've only had one go at putting the first IN HER NAME trilogy collection and SEASON OF THE HARVEST out for free on KDP Select, I'm not necessarily expecting the same stellar results from the next round. For one thing, when I put them free the first time, it was right before Christmas for HARVEST, and New Year's for IN HER NAME. Both of those are big shopping periods, so I probably got a nice boost from that from holiday bargain hunters and newly-minted Kindle owners.

On the other hand, while HARVEST has fallen to a level where it makes sense to put it up for free again (because I'm not going to lose a lot of sales, anyway), I'm not going to do that for IN HER NAME yet. At a rank of 1,500 in the Kindle store, it's still selling extremely well (the average for the month of January is over 100 sales per day), and it doesn't make sense to give it away in the hopes of boosting the rankings what will probably be a nominal amount. The old adage "don't fix what isn't broke" comes to mind.

My last suggestion is that if you have a list and decide to enter them all (or some portion of them) into a program like KDP Select, don't offer them free at the same time. If you do, and you give away your entire series free, well, that may not be so good. If a reader can pick up all of your books free, they're obviously not going to come back to buy more, because there's nothing to buy. Stagger your freebies, emphasizing the lead titles of any series, and try as much as you can to have your free days (if in KDP Select) bracket any convenient big sale periods.

Anyway, the bottom line if you're an author with a brace of books under your belt is to offer at least one of them free. Ideally, I'd say offer the first book of each series you have for free once their initial sales taper off. Use them as loss leaders and get them into the hands of as many people as you possibly can, and make sure you've got your bibliography prominently displayed at the front and back of the book so people can find your other offerings.

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