R.J. Price's Blog, page 3

Free!

Trouble is free for readers to buy until October 15th, the day after Dark Spirits comes out. Me, being a stupid head, put it free two days before Smashwords’ monthly cut off so I have no idea how well it’s doing.

What I do know is that over on B&N, Trouble, Sit Pretty, and Dark Spirits, have moved on their “best seller” sorting bit, to above the two books by another R.J. Price (I believe that is a Richard Price).

Over on Kobo, no change.

On Itunes? I don’t know because I’m the idiot who did it two days before the Smashwords monthly cut off. It could be blowing the “sales” out of the water and I’d never know until next month. Until Dark Spirits comes out.

Idiot.

This is the part where I sigh, shake my head and sip my coffee as I consider just how bad I am at marketing.

Then comes the dark overlord, Amazon.

Amazon is special, it won’t just let you make your book free because screw your ability to set the price for your own items! There is some… something to this, it does take a great deal of effort to get your book free and behind it all is a very good reason, but I am getting over a cold and can’t even begin to put it into words.

The only official way to get a book free on Amazon is to get it into KDP select and then do their five days a year or whatever it is, that they allow. Supposedly Amazon will even market this for you, that’s fantastic!

… But also freaking insane.

I want to try KDP select for Haven, but many of my readers, the ones I have on a mailing list, who I know will be interested in it, have avoided Amazon because, well… .mobi, KDP Select and so many other reasons. So I can’t do that.

The other way to get Amazon to put your book to free is to have it free everywhere else. Amazon will, eventually, price match. I’ve been told a couple of things for this, one was to have people report the different price for you, one was to make certain that price is on Itunes (who will then inform Amazon) another is to email Amazon yourself and tell them that the price has changed on other sites.

They reserve the right to price match or not price match. Thankfully, in my case, they price matched.

This is where the trouble began. I couldn’t see the change. I cleared my cookies, I cleared my history, I tried on three different connections across three platforms. Laptop, cell, tablet, everything told me that the price was still .97c (which was not my original price for it, as it was). Sometime this morning it converted over and I can now see the price, of course the change was almost a week ago.

I had to get several people to confirm that Trouble was coming up free after the first day. The reports told me that it was free, naturally. But the sudden spike dropped the next day and I couldn’t tell what was going on.

I went through a few marketing sites but haven’t seen much come from those. It’s all right, I didn’t really expect to sell a million copies of a free book. Though, in the past week I’ve sold more copies of Trouble on Amazon than I have all year… I think…

The idea behind a free book is to hook, line, and sinker, the readers. Catch them with the first and make them want to buy the next book. We’ll see how that works out, about the time Dark Spirits  comes out.

Until then I will keep checking Amazon’s reporting and trying to market the free book in the hopes of catching readers.