In Kindle publishing and General Self-Publishing you see a lot of authors giving away free books. From an outsider that can look really weird. You might wonder why authors are giving away things that they have spent months or even years creating. Well part of it is market saturation. With So many eBooks coming out, for many authors, this is the only way to really get seen. Other Authors don’t care about sales and just want to have written a book and go on with their lives.
The fact is with Self-Publishing you get the perfect storm of the “Free Economy”. What is the Free Economy? The Free Economy is our economy. People want things for free. By giving away free things you can drive revenue. It’s an economic theory, it’s a sales theory, it’s a theory that’s been working in video games and for advertising fro years. The Free Economy is a good thing.
How can you use this free economy to draw people to your Kindle books (or your self published books anywhere else?)?
Give something to get something. If you give an eBook to get an email address of a person who is interested in your genre and reads eBooks you are getting a highly targeted person to market to. They are your target. You wont be wasting you r time marketing to them. This would classify them as a lead. In business leads can be very expensive ranging from $25 all the way up to hundreds of dollars for leads in certain products.
You can also use free eBooks to give away parts of books. I’ve seen this done with great success where authors break the book into a three part story (kind of how publishing originally got started with the three section books. Beginning middle and end.) and then you are selling three small books and giving away the first part. You draw them in with your Kindle Book and then you lock down the sale on book 2, and 3.
You see the power of Free being used extensively in series. You get the first book for free. By the way there are two more. It’s the same idea as breaking 1 stand along book into three parts and giving the first part away for free. You drive traffic with a free book.
KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) has the Kindle Select Program. This program will allow your readers to find you on Kindle Select and read how ever much they like and you are paid per page. In this instance you are looking for a high volume of people to read your books. You get paid when they do so and if you think about it, these are likely going to be people who would not be predisposed to purchasing an eBook anyways. (Think about it. They are paying a monthly fee to get free eBooks. If you bought Netflix and had to pay for more videos wouldn’t you just stick to the free section. Most of us would).
Every one of these tactics can be used to drive revenue to your books. I’ve got some launches planned in the future that will be using these tactics as part of the relaunch of personal brand (and as a writer yes you are a brand).
If you enjoyed this please take a moment to subscribe to the blog or do me a favor and share this post to help other writers unlock the POWER OF FREE! And have a great day.
I have 3 Free eBooks on my Blog Here. Take a look and let me know what you think of them. Feedback means a lot to me.
Books and Mor 
It worked on me as a reader. I had seen a review of a particular author and was interested in the book. I then noticed he was was giving away book 2 in the series. So got that for free and felt sort of obliged, (but not in a bad way) to buy book 3. I felt like he was giving a lot away and I should repay his generosity. Those books don’t write themselves!!
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Thank you for your response. It give validity to what I am saying here. I meet a lot of other authors who don’t want to give things away but in our economy giving can get you very far.
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