Going perma-free on Amazon
Is it worth getting your ebook listed perma-free on Amazon? Does it helps sales?
Like many others before me, I wondered for ages if giving a book away for free would help sales overall. I think the biggest disagreement over whether this method works or not comes down to one simple question: Do you have other books to sell while you're giving one away?
If you only have one book and you give it away for free during a KDP Select promo (for maybe 2-3 days), readers will download it but obviously won't be able to buy anything else you have, so this won't help your sales much at all. Sure, when your book reverts to paid status after the promo, it will likely retain some exposure and garner a few sales -- but your book will quickly drop out of sight again, and that will be that.
If, on the other hand, you have an arsenal of books and you offer one for free, then you'll likely make some sales. Readers will sample your free book without obligation. If they like it, they'll come back for more. They'll trust you as an author and will happily spend a few dollars for each of your other books. So you'll give one away but gain followers that you wouldn't otherwise have had. It's simple and logical and well worth doing.
I suspect this works even better with a series. I don't know this for sure because I ONLY have a series and can't compare to sales of non-series books. However, when I think about (for example) the Maze Runner trilogy by James Dashner, I bought the first book hoping it would be good, read it in record time, and snapped up the second and third without hesitation. And the prequel. But it took me a while to move on to other books by the same author. Even though the author had gained my trust as a reader, it was that one particular series I was drooling over.
Then again, plenty of authors write only one-off novels, and once you've read a couple and trust what the author delivers, you tend to snap up the others pretty quickly... so maybe it doesn't matter whether they're series books or not.
Anyway -- after many promos between August 2012 and June 2013, I put Island of Fog (Book 1 of what is currently a 6-book series) up for free at Kobo and iBookstore. I imagined I would need to do what other authors do, which is to encourage friends to visit Amazon and "complain" that this $2.99 book is available for free elsewhere. Once alerted, Amazon would then price-match the book and set it to $0.00.
As it happens, Amazon price-matched it automatically within a few days. I suppose they have automated bots that seek out and check the prices of other copies of books they're already selling.
Island of Fog went free on Amazon on June 21st. Downloads started immediately although at a moderate pace. Things gained momentum over the next couple of days, and my Amazon ranking started rising. The best day was June 24th. It's slowing again now, though still chugging along quite nicely. Five days later I'm at around 6000 downloads.
Sales have picked up as a result of this, so I'm happy. It's interesting to see how sales of Book 2 in particular are strong, and soon it will be Book 3, and so on as readers devour the free Book 1 and move on through the series... but not ALL readers, of course. Really it's just a small percentage of those who downloaded Book 1, mostly because many readers grab free books while they can even though they don't have time to read them all. Also, some will read Book 1 and hate it. (Yes, that really does happen.) But anyway, since Book 1 is perma-free, the number of downloads will just keep on rising bit by bit, and overall might be more consistently better than occasional KDP Select promos.
So there's no question in my mind that free promotions and/or going perma-free are well worth the effort -- as long as customers have something else to buy, otherwise it's pointless. It stands to reason that if readers get hooked on Book 1, they'll work their way through the rest of the series however many more books there happen to be. Therefore, I'm planning a 20-book series. (Just kidding.)
Anyway, back to downloads and Amazon rankings. Here are a couple of screenshots of where my brief 15-minutes in the limelight got me. When you first go free, your ranking is way down there at 50,000-100,000 or whatever, but it rises fast as readers start downloading your book. Getting up into the Top 100 is some sort of milestone, and previously I had reached an overall ranking of #97 Free in Kindle Store. This time I beat my own record, reaching #52:
There's also a ranking for each category you end up in. Anywhere in the Top 20 means a placement on the first page of that category, which in turn means more downloads:
In the aftermath, my overall ranking dropped to #100, then rose to hover around #95 and #96, then up to #86, then down to #202, then back to #180... Meanwhile, my category ranking remains relatively high at the moment. So things have gone off the boil but hopefully will keep simmering rather than go cold. Only time will tell whether I'll end up making more sales overall with a free Book 1. I'll add updates below over the next few months.
