Is "Free" Too High A Price To Pay?

It’s a question a lot of Indie authors ask themselves, but isn’t easy to answer: “Should I do a free book giveaway?”
 
If you only have one book out there, then the answer is “No” (but there are caveats to that – see later in this blog).
 
The purpose of a free book promotion is to stimulate interest in your books, so that you sell more. But if you have given it away for free, who are you going to sell to?

​The people who have already had it for free aren’t now going to buy a copy, and if someone didn’t download it for free, they are hardly going to pay for it once the offer ends (again, see the caveats later).

No, the idea of a free book promotion, or giveaway, is to showcase your writing, so that if readers like the free book, they will then buy your other books. For series writers this is a great incentive for doing a free giveaway. And for non-series writing authors with more than one title available, there is something in this for you as well.

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"If it's free, I'll take 10, no 20, no 100 ...."

OK, let’s deal with the elephant in the room. Yes, it is true that some people will download the free offer just because it is free and won’t then come back to buy any more of your books. But that is what I call “collateral damage”. It is unavoidable I’m afraid.
 
But mixed in with the freeloaders will be readers who will try your book for free and then go on to buy more of your work if they like what they have read. I know this to be true because I have done it myself. I don’t think I’m unusual in this.
 
At Selfishgenie we have also proved it with previous giveaways, which have resulted in an up-tick in sales of the other titles in the series after the promotion has ended. When we talk numbers later in this blog, they are based on actual results from previous promotions.

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So, if you have more than one title available or you are a series writer, doing a free book giveaway can boost the sales of the rest of your books.
 
You may have sensed a “but” at the end of that sentence. If you did, you have excellent intuition.
 
But making a book free is no good unless you tell potential new readers about it, so that they can download it.
 
There are free book listings on most etailing sites; Amazon certainly has one. However, a quick search we did for free books on Amazon returned 9,000 results. The chances of your book being on one of the early pages of the search results are pretty slim and if your book is anywhere more than five pages down the results, there isn’t much chance of it being found because people hardly ever go that far down search results..

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I refined that search to “most downloaded free books” and the list was reduced to just 3 pages, but to get into that list your book must have already been download for free, so it won’t appear there on the day you start your promotion. It won’t appear there until someone, (actually several someones), has downloaded the book.
 
Social media promotion will probably shift a few downloads for you, if you have a lot of followers. However, there is no guarantee that your posts about your free offer will be seen. If you only have a very small following on social media, then your reach is limited unless you get a lot of re-Tweets or shares.
 
It may seem counter-intuitive, but you will probably need to spend some money to give your book away for free.

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I don’t think Amazon or Google advertising are cost effective ways of doing that.

You pay by the click, so it is difficult to control your spend because you probably need a lot of clicks to get enough downloads to start generating paid sales later, which means setting a high daily budget for your campaign.
 
So, you need to look at other, cheaper ways to promote your free book. Ways that will generate lots of downloads. And you really want to know how much those downloads are going to cost you in the first place, so you can work out if you have any chance of getting your money back in paid sales.
 
I’m talking about book promotion sites, which offer a fixed package for a fixed price.

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Now, there are two types of book promotion sites.

There are those that use social media to promote your book and those that use a wider range of approaches (which may include social media but may not).

​The most important of these other approaches is email lists, because they are bound to be seen by readers who are on the list.
 
Please, don’t use sites that only offer social media promotion - you can do that for yourself for free. Ignore the fact that your book will be “featured” on the promoter’s website. This isn’t the best way for the promotion to be seen. If that were the case, then it being on Amazon should be enough – and it isn’t.
 
There is usually no guarantee that the readers the sites reach are the right readers for your genre, however. You may be an author of fantasy books and some of the people on the email list may only read romance, or crime drama, or whatever. But at least the readers of fantasy will also see the promotion. Genre preferences are one of the reasons why a 1,000 clicks may only get 100 downloads.

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We have recently run a trial using a book promotion website, for our title “The Magi” which produced some promising results.

The site we selected boasts an email list of over 300,000 readers. The site promised a guaranteed 1,000 downloads for our free book but we actually only got just over 200 (I’ll return to that later, to explain how  the guarantee works).
 
We usually think in terms of 10% of downloads generating new readers for a series or, in this case, approximately 20 new readers.
 
So, here’s the maths (or math if you are American).
 
1. The promotion cost us £67 ($75) after using a discount code found in this blog
2. The book sells for £4.99 on Amazon.
3. One sale generates about £3.50 in royalties.
3. There are 9 books in the series.
4. If a reader who downloads the first book for free then buys the other 8 books, then it generates 8 x £3.50 = £28.
5. Therefore 3 new readers returns a profit of (3 x £28) – £67 = £14 profit on the promotion.
 
But we reckon 200 downloads should return 20 new readers, so the anticipated profit is about £490.
 
Impressed?

​Ok, too early to place an order for a Ferrari, but profit is profit.

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​But we were guaranteed 1,000 downloads, so what happens now that we have fallen 80% short?
 
The site owners promise us a pro-rata refund on the cost of the package. It is “site credit”, so we can’t take it in cash, but it does mean we can run another free book promotion in a few months’ time and it won’t cost us so much. It also means that our profit for this campaign will be higher because of the refund.

As for why we didn't get the guaranteed 1,000 downloads, we'll return to that later.

There is another aspect to the free downloads that we haven’t yet mentioned and that is the reviews that they generate. If you haven’t had many reviews for your book up to now, then this is a good way to get some more. I mentioned caveats earlier and this is one justification for an author with a single published title to run a free book promotion.

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Remember, there were 200 downloads. That may generate a lot of reviews. Even freeloaders write reviews sometimes.
 
And we all know how important reviews are for future sales.
 
There is another time when an author with only one published title may consider doing a free book promotion.

That is when they are about to publish a second title.

Putting the first book out for free can stimulate demand for the second book. To make sure that this is capitalised upon, the author must put their new title on “pre-order” before running the free promo, and they must include a link to the pre-order at the end of the free book. That means uploading an amended manuscript that includes the link, but that is the work of moments.

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Once the pre-order goes live, whatever sales have been made will catapult the book up the sales rankings, which makes the book look more attractive to other readers who may not have taken advantage of the free download.
 
However, it does require the book launch to be properly planned and timed, so that everything happens at the right time and in the right order.
 
The book promotions site told us that 92% of the promotions they run for free books reach the 1,000 download target, so why didn’t ours do so well?
 
We think we have some answers.

We ran our promotion from Thursday to Monday and the number of downloads we got over the weekend was very low compared to the other 3 days. This suggests a lot of the email addresses to which the promotion is sent are work related, so no response at the weekend.

​But there is another possible reason.

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Author Robert Cubitt

The author of the free book, Robert Cubitt, is British but around 80% of the readers on the promotion site’s email list are American.

Our actual downloads reflected that proportion, with about 20% coming from outside the USA (UK, Canada, Germany, France Netherlands and Australia to be precise) and 80% from within. Sad to say that many readers will only read books by authors who are the same nationality as them.
 
I don’t know why this should be. I guess people like books that are either written by people like them or are about people like them. But The Magi  is a sci-fi series and none of the characters are like the readers (unless there are aliens amongst us) so it shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter for the fantasy genre either.

But it does seem to matter, so we Brits will have to suck it up and make do with the scraps from the table. But a potential £490 profit is quite a big scrap and is certainly better than no profit at all.
 
This is NOT a recommendation, but the website we used for the promotion we have discussed here is Book Butterfly.
 
If you missed out on our recent free book giveaway, don’t despair. You can still get a book for free just by signing up for our newsletter. Just click on the button below (excludes “The Magi Box Set).

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