Amazon Raised Price of Permafree Book without Notice

[Marie Silk]

Hey everyone :) just wanted to share something that happened to my book yesterday. I was checking my sales report and was surprised to see a "paid sale" on my permafree novella. Amazon had agreed to price match this book to $0 back in January. So I looked up my book's product page and the price was set to .99, its original price.

It's not a huge deal to me since I had already been considering changing the price myself but wasn't sure how it worked with an Amazon price match in place. But if I had planned a promotion for this book with paid advertising, this would be a very inconvenient thing! I unpublished this book from other platforms a few weeks ago so I could have the option of putting in Select. I'm not sure if that has anything to do with it. But it was an interesting surprise and there was no notification from Amazon that they had changed it. Anyone else have a permafree book that changed price?

[Pamela]

Interesting! I imagine it's got something to do with the fact that you removed it from other stores as Amazon had nothing to price match against. They don't allow free books as such as there is a delivery fee for each book, meaning there has to be a cost - even for e-books.

[Marie Silk]

Have no fear, Alex. Your book is showing free in the U.S. :).

Thank you for the comment, Pamela. I wonder why Amazon is the only one who is like that with free books though. It was no trouble at all to list my book free on Google, Kobo, BN, or Apple.

So now that my book's permafree status is over, I'll report what I experienced with it. The book started out strong with over 1K Amazon downloads the first day it was free! Over the past 5 months, the downloads gradually tapered down to the point that there were only 1 or 2 per day. So I'm okay with taking it off permafree and trying something else now that I've given away a substantial amount.

[Christina]

In the KDP contract,they state that they will price match a book to free on a temporary basis for a promo, but permafree is not guaranteed. I suspect as others stated, it was due to the book not being free anywhere else at the time, but they've been known to take books off without reason.

[Graeme]

Thanks for posting this Marie. Interesting news.

[Angela]

If I want a book to permafree on Amazon, I publish it through StreetLib. That way there's no messing around getting Amazon to price match.

[H.E.]

I'd agree with Alex that it's likely they noticed that the book had been unpublished on the other sites, and therefore returned its price to their minimum of 99 cents.