Let’s talk about how to give books away.
Hang on, I can hear people say, giving books away is easy. People always want free books. Tell me how to sell them instead.
Well, yes, yes, and no.
Giving away books is not as easy as people might think. Making a book free is absolutely no guarantee that people will download it. It can, in fact, be surprisingly hard to give books away.
It’s even harder to give books away in a manner where the act of giving them out is beneficial to you.
It’s like clockwork: people take part in a big giveaway. They crow about giving out thousands of books, and lo and behold, a little while later, they complain that it had no effect.
Yet. I have a career solely because I give books away and have given them away for many years. Giving away books strategically so that it benefits you is hard.
So, how to do it?
- Less is always better. Target your giveaway to readers of your genre. Try to avoid the big broad giveaways.
- You HAVE to have a series for it to be useful. Preferably with 2 or more books to be bought for full price.
- You also have to give people some time to read the freebie. People value things according to what they paid for it. They don’t have a huge urgency to read freebies.
- For the previous reason, you might also try to make the first book 99c
- Make sure that it’s very clear, in all parts of the book, that there is another book after this one. Put “book 1” on the cover. Put links to book 2 in the back of the book. DON’T LEAVE THIS PART TO RETAILERS!!!
If you have all the above in place, you give away a few thousand books and you don’t see any effect, you have to consider the option that there is something about the book not right.
- The advertised genre doesn’t match the story
- The readers don’t buy book 2 from the end of book 1 because they never get to the end of book 1. The story didn’t hold their interest, was confusing or boring.
- Or the ending was too complete. It was never clear to them that there was another book in the series
It’s only that when you have all the above in place that it might make any sense whatsoever to start advertising the freebie. You can use list sites like Freebooksy. You can use ads like Facebook, although this can be quite expensive. Or you can do cross-promotions with other authors like on Bookfunnel, or orgnaise your own like the various Stuff Your Kindle free book events.
