As mentioned, Amazon maintains separate rankings for paid and for free ebooks, so any boost you get by giving your ebook away will evaporate if you start charging for it again.Īlso, separate populations of buyers have congealed - folks who pay for books… and folks who don’t. So why are people still interested in giving their books away? There are good reasons - I do it myself with a small number of my titles.Ī word of warning: while free ebooks were all the rage a few years back, they seem to be much less effective as a way of marketing yourself or your book now. Most of the retailers and aggregator/distributors allow you to set a price of zero.
However, there are still reasons to offer your book for free. About five or six years back, they created separate bestseller lists for free and paid books, so if you switched back and forth, you lost all of the momentum immediately - indeed, your book hadn’t been for sale for a while and so its ranking would have dropped while it was being given away.Īmazon, which had made it fairly easy to price your book at $0.00, made it a bit harder. So you could use a free story to plant yourself among the bestsellers - this was why people were touting the permafree giveaway as a great marketing ploy.Īlas, the retailers figured this out. The freebie boost also helped your author ranking, making all of your other ebooks easier to discover as well. This led to a windfall that lasted as long as your marketing and the quality of the book could keep it going. So that modest short story that a few thousand people had downloaded for nothing was now in the top ten at $3.99. The biggest benefit (if you’d only made your book free temporarily) was that, once you switched back over to paid, you kept your ranking. That gave the purveyors of those books a HUGE amount of visibility - it’s nice when your little five-thousand-word thriller is beating out big-name authors like James Patterson or Dan Brown. For this reason, the bestseller lists on their sites were full of free books - either temporarily or permanently free (aka permafree). In those days, Amazon and the other retailers didn’t differentiate between the rankings of free books and those that people had to pay for. It took a little while for me to figure out what the fuss was about. “Give your book away! You’ll make a fortune!”
Giving It Away: A Historyīack when I entered the ebook publishing world, “free” was the marketing tip of choice.
I told her that you CAN “sell” your ebook for free on Kindle Direct Publishing - they just don’t make it easy. The author wanted to promote her first book by giving it away - she’d been told that was the best way to make a splash. I had a client ask me recently why you can’t price an ebook as free on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform.
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