Several
months ago, I wrote about rethinking Amazon free promotions, in which an author
gives away a book at no charge for a day or two. The idea is to pull in some
readers who might not have found the book otherwise, with the hope that said
readers will tell friends, write reviews, and pay full price down the road for
another book if they liked the first one free.
At the
time, I was debating the effectiveness of the tactic and have now concluded,
based on steadily diminishing results, that it’s no longer worth it. With my
first two mystery novels, I did a free promotion within days of the book’s
release, and did about 20 more over the next year.
There has
been no free promotion for the third mystery in my series, Not Death, But Love, and I doubt there ever will be, though I
remain open to evidence. Several factors propelled me to that decision, but two
were particularly critical.
The Big Yawn
For a
period of a bit over two years, from July 2012 to October 2014, my free-book
giveaways were generating good numbers. Using the direct-mail analogy, I
figured an author had to give away a hundred books to get two to four read. In
the first couple of years, I was moving a hundred books a day on free days as
often as not, and sometimes as many as several hundred.
In the past
nine months or so, I’ve probably done 30 free giveaways and had only one
100-plus-book day. At that rate, I’d have been better off leaving the book out
there at full price and hoping I sold one copy each of those days.
I was also
seeing evidence that fewer people overall were participating in the free-book
frenzy, both as authors and as customers. Late last year and early this year,
it was not uncommon for one of my books to be in the top 50 Crime Fiction free
books with only 30-40 downloads. That’s a pretty low bar.
Done in by Borrowing
Part of
what I suspect is happening here is that Amazon has been promoting its Kindle
Unlimited program, which allows people to borrow books free for a 21-day period
once they’ve paid the membership fee. Authors get a small cut of the membership
money, but not as much as if the book were purchased, rather than borrowed.
In the past
two months slightly more of my books have been borrowed than purchased, which
shows the market is going in that direction. The allure of free ownership is
diminished by borrows. After all, why wait for a free-book day to come along
when you can borrow the book already?
So my
strategy now is to run Kindle Countdown promotions, in which one book each
month is offered at a discount for a period of several days. I don’t move as
many books with those promotions as I did with free giveaways, but the ones I
do move are going to likely readers. Or so I figure. You’re not going to pay
even 99 cents for an e-book unless you have some expectation of reading it. And
the strategy is always subject to change.
