The practice of selling ebooks for free is dates back to the early years of Kindle, and beyond. There are four ways to use free ebooks to promote one's work. They all are designed to attract readers, with three of them also hoping to promote the sales of the author's other books at their full retail price.
The first method of using free ebooks is to offer an usually full priced ebook for free for a limited time; usually three to five days. You can only do this on Amazon when you are in the Kindle Select program on Amazon, and only for a limited number of times. I am unfamiliar with this program, so I can't really go into its details or how well it works from personal experience. I believe you can do this on other platforms as well. What I can say is that this method, with its brief widow of opportunity, offers the greatest incentive to hit that BUY button. I know I've collected a number of ebooks because of the nature of the sale; get it for free now, or forever hold your peace.
I believe that popular authors of books can sell thousands to tens of thousands of ebooks even in this limited window. There is a discussion of this on Reddit here. The main takeaway is :
"If you're going for a 5 day freebie, you're going to want to crack the top 100 overall free. That's usually circa 1500 downloads in 24 hours for the bottom end with the #1 position requiring 20k+ (and sometimes much much more; a really good freebie can nab 100,000 downloads in a day with a BookBub+ stack)."
The top 100 referred to above is the overall Free Ebook list. Getting into the top 100 in various genre and sub-genre requires much less books sold. To get these types of numbers, you also need to couple the free promotion with paid advertising.
Reading through the other posts, it is clear that these promotions usually do not produce immediate, if any/many positive results to sales, ratings and reviews. The reason is that the incentive is to pick up the book now, not necessarily to read it now. I suspect that most of the free copies sold end up on the reader's thousand book long TBR list in their Kindle account. If you have to spend money advertising, advertising your free copies seems to be a questionable practice.
Speaking as a publisher, not as an author, I have to say that us publishers are concerned with only one number; sales. We don't care what people do with their books after we've made the sale. A sale is a sale. Any sale that leads to more sales is a bonus. And when you are selling something that costs you nothing, the conversion rate doesn't matter.
For a more typical result of free ebooks, here is an account from a self-publishing author, Ron Vitale. He writes in his blog:
In 2021, I gave away nearly 25,000 free books (I spent more than a thousand dollars on newsletter ads), but I didn’t make my advertising money back. In 2022, I gave away more than 5,600 books, but spent $0 in marketing on my fiction. So I wasn’t surprised to see that I earned so little on my fiction books this year (around $175).
I’ve had several readers in the last few years who have thanked me for the free ebook that I gave away through my newsletter, but they then apologized that they wouldn’t be able to get to reading it because they had hundreds of other free ebooks on their Kindle.
Free books used to work for me, but the publishing business has changed dramatically over the last few years, and I’m pivoting away in a different direction.
Ron Vitale offers the first books of his three fantasy book series for free, which is the second method of selling free ebooks. As you can see they earned him around $175 last year. Since they are still free when writing this post, he hasn't pivoted yet. (What do you pivot to?)
However, using the first book in a series to promote the series is a very popular reason for selling books for nothing. It's usually accomplished by listing the books for free in the other ebook stores and then getting Amazon to price match that price; i.e. make them permafree on Amazon as well, where you normally can't list your books for free, except for those brief sales. Because the book is always free, it lacks the urgent incentive to pick it up now, so you may sell less of them in the short run. On the other hand, because it is always available, readers who do take advantage of the free price are more likely actually interested in reading the book now than those who are grabbing it up during a short, limited time sales window to add to their TBR pile while the book is free.
How well the free first book in a series works depends on a number of factors, the two most important factors are, one how accomplished the author is and how polished the book is. And two, does the book work for the reader. I've picked up a number of free first in a series SF books - all highly rated - and I have to admit that not only did I not continue on with any of the series, but I don't think I ever got more than halfway through any of them. They didn't work for me. But I would never have even tried them without the free ebook. The alternative, as I talked about last time, is paying Amazon, or Facebook, or some promotional email company money to feature your books, and from what I can gather, you can't expect a great return on your investment going that route either.
The thing is that the conversion rate of that first free ebook in the series to go on to buy the retail priced books of the series need not be high to be successful. With a free ebook you are casting a wide net, reaching readers who would otherwise not be willing to pay for the book. It is up to the free ebook to convert them, and the better the book is, the more it will convert. But, as I said in my last post, ebooks are free to produce, so it costs nothing to give lots of them away to gain even the occasional conversion. All in all, unless you are happy with the number of books you are selling, you likely have nothing to lose by making the first book in a series free.
It only takes a couple of minutes to change the price of an ebook, so you are never locked into any one way of pricing your books. Indeed, without experimenting with price, you'll never know what works and what doesn't. Well, you may know what doesn't work. And if your price is working, you don't need to experiment.
A third way authors utilize free ebooks is to offer an ebook for free on their website, usually as an inducement to sign up for their newsletter, i.e. to get a email address to market to. I think a lot of authors offer a free novella or short story related to one of their series. The downside is that the author still has to get a reader interested enough to visit their website - probably by advertising/promotion - and then have the site set up so that a visitor is able to download a file on request.
The fourth way to sell free ebooks is to sell all or most of them for nothing all of the time. This is a rather radical approach, but there is a case to be made for it. Luck is often involved in the success of a book. The chances of getting your book into the hands of a book bellwether; i.e. someone who can create the buzz needed to sell books increases with the number of your books available, and the ease of acquiring them. The more books you have, the more likely lightning will strike one. The easier it is for a book to be read, the more likely lightning will strike one. Just say'n.
I've taken this approach from the beginning of my publishing business in 2015. As a writer, I want my work read and hopefully enjoyed. As a publisher, I want to serve the needs of my author-self, i.e. getting my books read. While lightning has not struck any of them, I have sold over 77,000 books and grossed something like $600 on the non-priced-matched books on Amazon without spending a penny on advertising nor have I lost money publishing my books. I have no way of knowing how many books I would've sold at any price or how much money my publishing business has left on the table by selling them for free. But I do know that I'm not writing the type of books that fit into the best selling mainstream of any genre, nor am I writing them fast enough, so I don't lose any sleep over the money I might've left on the table by sharing rather than selling my work.
People will say that no one actually reads free books. Of course not all the books I've sold have been read. But then that is true of paid books as well. I once read that half of the paid books on readers' kindles had not been read. And when you see stacks of paper books on avid readers' TBR pile awaiting to be read, it is clear that a lot of people buy books with good intentions, but may never get around to reading them, at least anytime soon. And, as I've said before, we publishers don't care what people do with the book after we sell it; a sale is a sale. Now, ideally it would be nice if they did read them, like them, and then go on to read more of our books. But if unread books are the cost of acquiring readers, it's still a bargain.
Offering all your books free is not a popular option. Indeed, I know of only one other author who publishes all his books for free, and that is Michael Graeme. No doubt there are others, but, as I wrote about in the first installment of this series, I have a feeling that most authors feel like many readers; i.e. the price of the book reflects the value of the book. Nevertheless, pricing your products below competing products is a marketing 101 strategy. Companies sell products at or below cost - loss leaders - to attract buyers so as to sell them other products at a profit. Hell, why do all the ebook retailers carry free ebooks at all - even Amazon? They don't make any money on the sale of a free ebook, so free ebooks must bring some other value to their table. My guess is that value is that free ebooks enhance their catalog by inflating the number of books they offer, which in turn, entices customers to their store who will also buy non-free books. And as I will point out one last time; an ebook costs nothing, and can be sold at a price of nothing without losing money and that sale serves a purpose, promoting the sale of the other books by the author, or, in my case, expand my readership, which is why I write books. Oh, and perhaps to add a little joy to the world.
So to summarize; unless authors have been hired or are under contract to write a book, no one owes them any money for doing so. They can ask for money, but it will be the market that determines the value of their work, not them. Selling ebooks for free is a no-cost and widely used way to attract readers, introduce your work, and perhaps sell more non-free books. A free price will not, however, automatically make them more visible to the broad market; only active promotion and paid advertising will do that. However appearing in the smaller, but still significant marketplace of free ebooks, they will be much more visible due to the fact that this is a much less crowded market place. The fact of the matter is that there is no good, cheap, and efficient way to sell books. Traditional publishers choose a limited number of books to promote each quarter, ("lead titles") and let the rest sink or swim. (Most sink.) These days deep pocket indie-publishers dominate the self-publishing marketplace, and unless you have both deep pockets and expertise, and have written a well researched mainstream book, any paid advertising will likely be no more successful in promoting your work than free ebooks would, and cost you a lot more.
So, there you have it; the philosophy, theory and practice of selling books for free. For readers, I hope you understand better why I sell my books for free, and any authors reading this, I hope I've given you something to think about.
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