Toying With New Idea: Preview Book

Hello all!

For the last several days, I’ve been toying with a new idea. I’ve never heard of this being done before, but I’ve pitched it to some other authors and the general consensus seems to be that it is worth a shot.

The idea is to release a “preview book”, literally just a collection of chapters in the Color of Water and Sky series, for FREE on Amazon.com. The chapters would be spoiler-free. They would provide a sample of this world for readers, but not give them the full story. Here are what I see to be the main pros and cons:

Pros:

By nature of being free, the book will get a lot of downloads even without advertising. This is beneficial because it will increase my Amazon author rank. The way author rank works is simple: the more books downloaded, the higher the rank. The higher the rank, Amazon’s algorithm will place my content higher on their search feeds. This would obviously be very beneficial to me.
It would serve as a form of free advertising for the series. When people download the free sample book, they would learn about the series, get exposed to it and likely read reviews of the other books.
Readers would get a taste for the series and get a better sense of whether or not they want to purchase the books. I think a lot of the time it is hard for readers to commit to a book because they are not sure if they can get into the story. This “preview book” would provide their first foray into the books, without forcing them to commit to purchasing anything first.

Cons:

I can see this being very confusing for people who look at the series listing on Amazon. They see a book marked “Book 1” and a book marked “Series Preview”. I can understand that it might be hard for people to know what to read in which order. I also worry about people who start with Book 1 and then later find out about the preview after the fact and regret not downloading it first.
People would not be getting a full story with this preview book, merely a few sample chapters. I can see people getting rather annoyed by this fact. People want a full story, not a chunk of one. Back when I was part of the Broken Tomorrow Boxset Collection, this was a major complaint I received in my reviews.

As I have been putting a lot of thought into this idea lately, it naturally crossed my mind that I would need cover art for this preview book. Should I go through with it, I think I will end up using the cover art I originally commissioned for Cassidy. To be honest, I think the art would be better served for a preview book of this nature anyway. Take a look below:

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There is a lot of blank space on the image, which allows me to include text explaining what the book is. Plus this image fits perfectly into the prologue of book 1, which is definitely a chapter I would include in the preview.

Obviously this means I would need NEW artwork for Cassidy, but I’m not all too concerned about that. I have been having second thoughts about this piece as the Cassidy cover anyway.

Should a preview book like this actually come to fruition, it likely would not be until after Kholvaria‘s upcoming release. I will also put Iris on sale for free for four days next week, just as an experiment to see what happens. I don’t want to jump into this endeavor without a good sense of free book download statistics.

Stay tuned for more on that.

In other news, I have another interview out! Readcommendations, who interviewed me last year, has done another piece. You can read the full text HERE.

In other other news, my two Headtalker campaigns could still use support. The more support, the merrier! There are a few more days left to support these before they go out. Here are the links:

#1: https://headtalker.com/campaigns/kholvaria-release-day/

#2: https://headtalker.com/campaigns/tcowas-kholvaria-kindle/

For more on Headtalker, check out my last blog post HERE.