Why Amazon Free Days Won’t Work
When my first book wasn’t selling, I hit the Internet to find out what was working and what strategy I could use to get my book to sell at least a few copies! It was downright depressing.
Sometimes the Internet can be a blessing and a curse, there was a wealth of information but it was hard to see what advice 
I actually needed to follow. One strategy that kept popping up was the KDP Select free days.
If you’re not familiar with how this works, you have to enroll in KDP Select on Amazon. When you do, you have to agree to make your book exclusive to Amazon. You can’t even sell it on your website.
Once you’re enrolled, you get the option to make your book free five days out of every 90 days. All the information online said to make your book free for those days and it would help your book sales.
I took the advice and enrolled. I made my book free and it was downloaded over 15,000 times in those five days. I was excited because with that many people downloading it I thought I would get a lot of reviews and a bunch of sales afterwards.
If you check the reviews right now, I have twelve. I made this book free three years ago so the reviews obviously didn’t come in. Sales? After the promotion, I sold 100 books. That was many more than I had before but after that first month, the sales died off.
The current strategy
You can tell by the title of this post that I’m not a fan of this strategy in the way I was taught. As a writer, I want to approach this objectively and acknowledge that people may not have reviewed the book or recommended it because they thought my book sucked.
I’m sure there are people who did think it sucked and that’s cool but after using other strategies that book has now sold over 30,000 copies. Someone must like it!
Let’s just think about a few things. Amazon estimates that for every 1,000 times your book is downloaded during a free promotion you’ll on average get one review, ONE REVIEW! You would be better off giving your book to ten strangers and asking them to review it. You would probably get at least two people to review it.
Amazon even has a killer suggestion for not only getting reviews but reviews that matter. Check their suggestion here.
The problem with this strategy is with the numbers. Do you remember when we talked about conversions? The theory is that once your book gets up there you’ll get ranked high, even number one in a category that will help your book continue to sell.
Think about this, when was the last time you bought a book by an author you didn’t know because it was number one in a category on Amazon? I’m guessing the answer is close to zero times. The ranking in a category doesn’t matter to the average book buyer, but it’s good to leverage in other ways.
Hoping people share your book after it’s free and hoping Amazon’s algorithm kicks in is not a good strategy. There’s a better way to use the free days that has some thought behind it. Before we get to that, if you have a Goodreads account, check out an interesting discussion about Amazon’s free days here.
One of the biggest downfalls of this strategy is not being able to sell your book on your own website. Amazon is the big boy in our industry and whether or not you like them, you need your book on Amazon.
However, you miss a HUGE opportunity when you don’t sell your book on your website: the opportunity to connect with that book buyer directly. When someone buys a book on Amazon they get the email address of that person.
When someone buys your book off of your website, you get their email address and at the very least an opportunity to connect with them and a chance to sell them something else in the future.
When I write that, I don’t want you to think of this in the sleazy Internet-marketer type of way. Think of it this way: someone buys your book and gets incredible value. Then, later you offer a deal on coaching. Since they’re on your email list and have already gotten value, they take the deal.
Selling your book on your website is a lot more profitable. You get direct access to your customers. That’s invaluable and something you can’t get from KDP Select.
A better strategy
I want to give you three ways to use KDP Select in a better way:
1. Spread a message: If your book is all about spreading a message and not about the money, make it free. Promote the heck out of it and get the book in thousands of people’s hands to start changing lives. If you don’t care about the money, then it doesn’t matter, make that puppy free. You can also make your book free if you just want to build an audience and introduce people to your writing.
2. Promote throughout the book: You decide you want to promote your other services or your website, make the book free and get the book in the hands of 15,000 people. You make your offers in the book super appealing. A portion of those people see you’re an authority and they hire you. They see you’re producing killer content so they sign up for your email list and become customers later. Promote the book during the free days to maximize downloads but make sure you have killer offers throughout the book that lead back to you converting one way or another.
3. Use the free days with a series of books: This to me is by far the best strategy. You have at least two books that are a series, more than that would be better. You make the first book in the series free, people love it, and naturally they’ll want to see how the series ends. Then they’ll buy all the books in the next series. This works especially well for fiction books but can work well for non-fiction. It’s the strategy that helped Jasinda Wilder become a NY Times best-selling author with her self-published books. Think about how amazing that is. She had eight books and made the first one free. People kept wanting to follow the series. In six months she and her husband published 20 books. See her story here.
Look, in the end you have to decide what’s best for you. Success online means testing what works for your platform. There is an absolutely killer article that talks a lot about what I talked about. Check it out, it’s a fabulous read.
My hope is that this helps you decide what’s best for you. Many people will give you advice that they’ve heard works but they haven’t had success themselves. That’s not good advice to follow. If you need help with self-publishing, check out the series I just did. Many people told me it was valuable.
If you want more specific help, I do offer coaching and have helped many authors self-publish their books and do well. I myself have self-published two books that have sold over 82,000 copies, so I know a little about this stuff 
What has been your experience with making your book free on Amazon?
P.S. On Tuesday I’ll be hosting a live chat on my Facebook Fanpage and Twitter using the hashtag #Dreamchat! We’ll be talking about chasing your dreams and practical advice on how to make them a reality, hope to see you there I’ll be giving away one free hour of coaching!
