Permafree Results For Indie Authors
One of the perennial debates in indie author land is whether or not making the first book in your series free still works or not.
At this point, I have a lot of different series and quite a few different ones with free first books in series. I thought it might be interesting to dig into the sales data and see what percentage of people who downloaded the first book went on to the second book and then the final book in the series.
A few caveats and conditions:
-First, this is only for 2024 and 2025, since I wanted a set time sample for the data. Additionally, this is useful for showing the conversion rate on a finished series that hasn’t had a new book in years.
-Second, it will only apply to series whose first books were free for that entire time period.
-Third, when I talk about “conversion rates”, I mean what percentage of free downloads translated into sales. For example, if Book 1 had a hundred free downloads, and then 12 sales of Book 2 and 9 sales of the final book, that means twelve percent of people went on to the second book, and then nine percent onto the final book. So we had a conversion rate of 12% from the free first book to the paid second book, and a conversion rate of 9% from the free first book to the final book in the series.
So, with all that in mind, let’s take a look at permafree conversion rates for some of my series in 2024 and 2025.
-THE GHOSTS. 13.47% percent went to the 2nd book, and 12.72% went on to the final book.
-FROSTOBRN. 13% went to the 2nd book, and 12.93% to the final book.
-SEVENFOLD SWORD. 22.93% went to the 2nd book, and 22.81% on to the final book.
-CLOAK GAMES. 11.85% went on to the 2nd book, and 11.67% on to the final book.
-SILENT ORDER. 14.64% went to the 2nd book, and 14.54% went to the final book.
-THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS. 17.46% went to the 2nd book, and 17.46% went on to the final book.
So, I think there are a couple of conclusions we can draw from this.
First, making the first book in a series permafree remains a viable marketing strategy. It doesn’t usually result in dramatic spikes of sales, but is instead good at generating more of a steady trickle.
Second, anything you can do to increase the number of downloads of your free ebooks will likely increase the sales of the paid books later in the series. That said, there are caveats. You want methods to increase the free downloads to people that might conceivably be interested in buying the books. Targeted advertising can be an effective way to do this. What’s not effective is using bot farms or help from a bunch of scammers to generate a big download in free books. At best, you’ll generate a bunch of downloads that won’t convert. At worst, the ebook platforms will detect suspicious activity and either delist your free ebook or suspend your account.
Third, this strategy works even with books that you don’t promote very often. For example, I don’t bash on THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS because for some people it’s their favorite book of mine, but in all candor I do think it’s one of my weaker books. I was trying to do something with urban fantasy I don’t think I had the skills to do until CLOAK GAMES, which was like twelve years later. So I don’t really promote it, save that I made the first book in the series free a long time ago and kept it that way. Yet still seventeen percent of the people who downloaded the first book continued to the final one.
Fourth, this strategy does require some patience. It can take a while for people to read through a series, and it can also take a while for a free book to get traction.
Fifth, I at times hesitate to recommend this because saying “write five books and make the first one free” is easy to say, but it is a lot of work to do. For many new writers, getting that first book done and out into the world is a monumental challenge. Then telling them to do it three or four more times and then to make the first book free seems like a big ask.
But it does work. Sometimes slowly, but it does work.
With that in mind, here is a link to all my currently free books. 
-JM
