Free and Permafree

As an Indie, I’ve often used Amazon KDP’s ‘free days’ to promote my books, but 5 free days out of 90 has never felt like enough. And being forced to sell the book exclusively on Amazon for those 90 days rankled. That’s why I’ve always yearned to make at least some of my books ‘permafree’ – i.e. permanently free.

In marketing terms, this is called a ‘loss leader’, meaning that revenue is lost from one book in order to lead potential customers to other books that are not free. Given how hard it is for Indies to be ‘discovered’ in the first place, permafree can be a very powerful marketing tool, but only if you have one or more series. Make the first book in the series free and hope like hell that people like it enough to buy the rest.

Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t support permafree. Or should I say, it only supports permafree as part of its price matching policy. This is where going wide comes in. You put the first book of the series up for free on a number of retail platforms and then request that Amazon match ‘the price’. If all goes according to plan, the book will eventually become permafree on Amazon as well.

So that’s the theory. Here comes the reality check. Up the top of this blog you’ll now see a page called ‘Books by acflory’. If you click on it, you’ll see every book I’ve ever published, along with a link direct to the named retailer [sorry, the links in the sidebar lead only to the Amazon ‘Look Inside’ feature].

There are five links to five retailers: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Angus & Robertson and Indigo. And guess what? Miira and The Vintage Egg are now permafree on all of them except Amazon.

You can either click on the book page or click on the links below. Oh, and while you’re at it, please scroll down to the end of the post for details on the 5 free days coming up for ‘How to Print Your Novel with CreateSpace‘. Even if you never print your novel, you may as well have the book handy, right?