I’ve paid for advertising on book blogs. I’ve targeted ads on special interest blogs. I’ve paid for Adwords and Facebook ads. I’ve done interviews. I’ve done guest blogs. I even did a post for cnngo.com. I recorded a character interview. I have two blogs. I have over 27,000 Followers on Twitter and almost 200 hundred on Facebook. And, nothing, nothing has worked as well to promote my books as a free giveaway.
In May I celebrated a year as an author. By that point I had sold 10,000 copies of all of my titles combined. To say thank you, I gave away my first book, Post-Apocalyptic Nomadic Warriors for free for a couple of days using Amazon’s KDP select program.
In the first day and a half I gave away 7,500 copies.
Again, in one year I sold 10,000 total books across my library. In a day and a half I gave away 7,500.
Post-Apocalyptic Nomadic Warriors made the Top 30 of Amazon’s FREE list. Three to five a second were being downloaded. It was insane.
It’s my thought that most of those downloads will never be read. I think a lot of people load up on free books and probably never get around to them.
Even so, my sales jumped. At the time I was selling about 10 copies of the book a day. After the promo ended It jumped to nearly 100. I still have never hit that magic moment others talk about when they’re selling 1000’s a day. But for that month sales were the best I’d seen.
The power of the giveaway is the ranking. The more people that grab it for free, the higher your book will appear on the paid lists when it’s over. It’s a little scary to see so many copies going out – you’re constantly thinking, “there goes another couple of bucks,” but you know that’s not the case. Most of these people would not have taken the chance on you if the title wasn’t free. Don’t worry. The bump comes after the giveaway.
Still you should do everything you can to help push the freebies. Ask your Twitter friends to spread the news. Create a promotional graphic for it like this one:
Write a blog post about it. Whatever you can do. Get those numbers up. I can’t promise you’ll see a jump but it costs you nothing.
By the way, Post-Apocalyptic Nomadic Warriors is really free this week. Get it here. As of now I’ve given away over 3600 copies. it’s at #61 on Amazon’s free list. I know it can go higher.
