Getting it Wrong?

[Mia]

I've read a lot of stories from fellow authors about when their books went free. Either as promotional KDP Select free days on Amazon, or just free across the board, talking about thousands of downloads in short periods of time.

My book is free across the board and has had what I think is reasonable response and downloads. I'm not complaining, but wondering if I'm doing something wrong. I know I'm not the best at marketing, but I think I've gotten it out there somewhat.

What are other people's experiences with this that you might like to share? Did you do anything in particular? I mean, I not ill content with how things are going, but obviously if I can make it go better, that would be good.

So... have other people found this to be the case with their free reads?

[Jeffrey, Lentarian Fire Thrower]

What I can tell you from my own experience is that it took a little bit to catch on. Maybe a week at the most. As soon as Amazon price matched Smashwords then I noticed I was getting maybe twenty downloads a day. Then it went crazy. Averaged 2000 downloads a week for a while.

I held my breath. Surely with all those downloads sales of my 2nd book would pick up. Boy, did it! It went crazy for a while, too.

Yeah, sales and downloads have slowed somewhat, but I still get a comfortable amount of sales each day. And I've decided to leave my first book free for he time being. I plan on going through it again to correct mistakes I made w/o realizing I did it at the time.

[Mia]

Might I ask what sort of marketing you've done? I mean, did you make it free and set it loose? Or do you have a particular marketing plan? If I might be intrusively curious!

[Ken]

I don't think I can improve on what you did/said. I just listed Book 1 free for 1 day and got 300 downloads. I am still waiting to see if it translates to sales for the rest of the series. My approach for now is to list Book 1 for free, once per quarter for this year.

[Paul]

There's a couple of places you can list your free book on the amazon kindle forums without offence to help get it noticed. Tread carefully though as a misplaced listing will get deleted by amazon and incur forum wrath.

I also ran a google Adwords campaign with a large selection of keywords associate with free kindl books (using free coupon).

I also observed it's a Catch 22, the higher your book places the more downloads you get.

Make sure your categories are set and that you'vest you seven search words in KDP.

[Mia]

I wondered about where to list in the Kindle forums, but forums tend to overwhelm me and I'm scared of getting yelled at as roundly as I would if I placed the notice wrong. :P

[Paul]

Two safe places I have found are the Meet the Authors forum (put there by amnazon for self promoting authors) and in some forums the daily 'freebies' listing (just add a link, no more, ppl trawl those lists).

I also engaged in a few fun discussions and recommended books to those that asked (absolutely not my own, that's a big no). It's worth spending some time there to get a feel of the community as they are your readers.

I even made some new friends who are here. Worth the time and effort.