Goodreads Authors/Readers discussion

The old adage goes, "The best way to sell a book is to write another one." This is especially true if you write books in series. I have found that when I run free promos on one book in a series the sales for the other books increase dramatically. Offering a free book is the best way to advertise your other books, and gain fans.
Using KDP select through Amazon it is possible to run free promo days, but only 5 days at a time once every 3 months and the rest of the time the book needs to be priced at $2.99 or more. But what if you want the first book in a series to be permanently free? It can be a lengthy process, but it can be done.
The first step is that the book cannot be in KDP select. It must be offered free through other vendors. The easiest way to achieve this is using Smashwords to distribute the book to other vendors including B&N where it will be free. Then on the Amazon page you have to get people to click on the Tell Us About a Lower Price link so that Amazon is aware that the book is available elsewhere for free and then they match the price. The problem is it doesn't happen overnight. I don't know the magic number of how many people or how many clicks it takes to get Amazon to get on board with the free book, but I know it works. It worked for me.
I went through this process with my first book, Love's Fate. I offered it free through every other site and periodically clicked on the lower price link on Amazon providing them with the free links. I wasn't sure if it was going to work, but I kept at it. While waiting for Amazon to match the free price I had dropped the price of the book to 99 cents, which I could only do because it was no longer KDP select. I did leave the rest of the books in the series as KDP select books. Amazon finally matched the free price about 6 months after I began the process and only after I ran a free promo on a different book in the series which caused a spike in sales for the first book. Perhaps it was the spike in sales that caused Amazon to take notice, or perhaps other people had begun clicking the lower price link. Either way my first book in the Love's Trilogy is now permanently free and as a result I have seen a steady increase in the sales of the following books in the series.
So here's my proposal. Let's help each other out. If you have a book that you would like to be permanently free on Amazon list your links here. The Amazon link and the free links. I will go to your books page on Amazon to click on the lower price link for you, if you will do the same for me.
I am once again trying to get a series starter to be listed as permanently free. Here are my links:
B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-sum...
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JGHTGHQ

Remember just go to the Amazon link, click on Tell Us About a Lower price and copy paste in the B&N or Smashwords links for the free version of the book.

Don't forget to post your links here so I can do the same for you!

I had been wondering how this was accomplished for a while now. I suspected that price matching was the answer, but hadn't been sure. Thank you for confirming this! I am considering listing my collection of short stories as permanently free in hopes of increasing the sales of my full length novel.

When I make the final decision I will post the links here. In the meantime, I am happy to help you out with your series. I'll be clicking those links right away.

Thank you for this valuable tip!

Thanks Virginia! If you decide to do this for your anthology I'll be happy to return the favor. Remember to include the link for your full length novel at the end of your free collection so that a reader can easily click on it while it is fresh on their mind. I've also found that keeping my non-free books in KDP is helpful because I've seen a big increase in borrows. At times a borrow earns me more money than a sale! There are also a lot of great sites to advertise free books which by default will advertise your paid book! I've got a great link for that I'll post later when I'm back at my computer.

Tracey wrote: "Don't forget to post your links here so I can do the same for you! "

Done. I'll hold you to it down the line.

I wrote an article on this: https://amsterdamassassin.wordpress.c...

I have two short stories free downloads, but I'm trying to get the third story set free as well:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Fundamental-Err...

Kobo: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebo...

Lola & Tracey, I reported the free downloads to Amazon. Good luck.

Thanks everyone!

Martyn and Lola, I submitted your free links to Amazon.

Al, I'm happy to repay the favor whenever you are ready to post your links here.

Also here is the link I mentioned earlier on. This is a great resource for promoting free books! http://authormarketingclub.com/member...

There's a well established thread for this in the Smashwords Authors group you all might want to check out:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Thanks Micah, joined the group!

Tracey wrote: "Thanks everyone!

Martyn and Lola, I submitted your free links to Amazon.

Al, I'm happy to repay the favor whenever you are ready to post your links here.

Also here is the link I mentioned earlie..."

Could you report back to us if and when the book goes free? We'd like to know if this worked.

Since Amazon owns GoodReads, I wonder how much attention they pay to threads like this and if they ignore us as a result.

I will definitely report back when the book gets price matched. The last time I went through this process it did take several months, and I think the sales spike had a lot to do with it.
At that time I had a three book series, I wanted the first to be perma free and had been clicking the lower price link for several months. I then ran a free 5 day promo using KDP select for the third book in the series. While book 3 was free I sold 100 copies of book 1 at the 99 cent price over the course of a weekend. It was immediately after that when Amazon finally matched the free price. I do think the spike in sales is what caused Amazon to take notice of the book.
So this time around in addition to clicking the lower price link I am also going to ramp up advertisement for the book I'm trying to get price matched. Having it currently priced at 99 cents allows for a lot of free advertising options. Will keep you all posted :)

Well...I just tried to do this for the first time with a short story. I put it for free on Smashwords first, then submitted to Amazon at .99. I just got an email stating they found it available for free on the internet and are questioning my publishing rights. If I'm reading the email right, they're saying I have to make it public domain, and then saying I could loose all publishing rights with them if they determine I don't hold the copyright. There's no chance of that, because I wrote it...but I don't think I want to try and figure it out. I have numerous full length novels on KDP and it would devastating to mess with them over a free short story. I think I'm just going to pull it from Amazon and leave it free on Smashwords.

That's odd Tara. I'm not sure what happened with your short story. All of my books were started out as KDP books, and I waited for the 3 month contract to expire before offering free on Smashwords and reducing price on Amazon. I've never made any of my books public domain, and would definitely not recommend doing that! Perhaps Amazon is under the impression that the free book offered through smashwords is not authored by you? Strange occurrence. I've never heard of anyone having that problem before.

Maybe it's because I did them both on the same day? If I ever try again I'll do the three month wait. it's so short though, that I didn't feel right charging anything for it!

It worked! A Summer Romance is now free on Amazon!

It worked for me as well - Fundamental Error: A Katla KillFile is now free on Amazon.com and has been downloaded already 27 times!

Thank you, everybody!

Congrats Martyn! And thanks for the help!

I would appreciate any help getting my first novel in the Frameways Multiverse series price matched. I posted this in the Smashwords forum as well, so I apologize for any that get both of these. I will of course reciprocate. Thanks!
Dark Luminance- Smashwords - http://bit.ly/1N8pYcb
Dark Luminance- Amazon - http://amzn.to/1CXZgyK
Dark Luminance- Kobo - http://bit.ly/1bxk2vU
Dark Luminance- B&N - http://bit.ly/1OAyjXH

This is very slow: what I did is I contacted KDP support and they made my story free after I provided links to other retailers with a lower price.

Sent your links E.M.

Thanks Tracey!

Thanks everyone for the reporting.
Just an FYI... I saw some earlier recommendations about reporting the price drop through KDP support, and that seemed to work great for me. I simply reported that the book was free on Smashwords and all of their distribution platforms.
I emailed them, and got a response about 4 hours later that the price had been matched.
Hope that helps!

I just sent Amazon an email, I've been trying to get price match on some short stories for a while now. Hope that works!

These are the four if anyone cares to report. Or download.. :)

The Interview
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008KQ49JE free link https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...

A Burning Problem (essay)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008D5DS4O free link https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...

I'm Sorry
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CELVT5S free link https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...

The Second Coming
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CLWVLVC free link https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...

All I got from KDP so far is a "we'll think about it".

Virginia wrote: "I had been wondering how this was accomplished for a while now. I suspected that price matching was the answer, but hadn't been sure. Thank you for confirming this! I am considering listing my coll..."

Tracey, all this is new to me. I don't understand how having your book listed as free is helpful if you don't have a series. I don't know the best ways to use Goodreads as yet.
Any tips you can give me will be most appreciated. And what does Smashwords do?

Join the group Taming Amazon. Follow the topics on making your book perma-free and on publishing beyond Amazon. This should be really helpful.

David wrote: "All I got from KDP so far is a "we'll think about it"."

I did not have luck contacting KDP directly either. This is why I tried this other route, which is admittedly not the fastest but it does seem to work.

Patricia wrote: "Virginia wrote: "I had been wondering how this was accomplished for a while now. I suspected that price matching was the answer, but hadn't been sure. Thank you for confirming this! I am considerin..."

In my opinion the only way that making your book free will help is if you have other books to sell. At the end of the free book you would include links to your paid books with some sort of tag line like "If you enjoyed this book check out..." or "Other books by this author..."
The idea is that as an unknown author you are getting one of your book into the hands of many readers for free, and if they then like your writing style, like your book, they are more likely to purchase other books you've written. It does work best if you've written a series. People are more likely to buy the next book in a series if they've fallen in love with the characters and story line of the first book which they were able to download for free. However it can also work if you have written stand-alone books that are similar in genre. Again going on the assumption that they enjoyed your free book they are more likely to want to purchase and read more books that you've written. It is important to make it easy for the reader while it is fresh on their mind by having links at the end of your free book. Hope this helps!
Also, Smashwords is a book publishing site, much like KDP, however it distributes your book to multiple vendors: Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple, etc. You cannot include vendor links at the end of a smashwords published book because if someone buys the book on Kobo they don't want a link at the end directing them to Amazon or B&N. However for your smashwords version you can include a link to a website if you have one and from that website readers could find buy links for your other books. If you don't have an author website yet, wix.com is a very easy to use site where you can create one for free.

Draft2Digital is another company similar to Smashwords that does pretty much the same thing. I'm very happy with D2D, and I've heard nothing but good things about Smashwords. The world beyond Amazon!

When I first published I used both KDP and Smashwords to make my book available through as many venues as possible. I noticed after the first 6 months or so that the bulk of my sales were through Amazon. I had made around $100 in sales with Amazon and less than $5 through all other vendors via smashwords. At that point I decided to pull my book from the other sites and switch to KDP select so that I could take advantage of some of the benefits they offered, like free days. I only recently removed two of my books from the select program and reintroduced them through Smashwords. This time the sole purpose was to get Amazon to price match those books and make them free. In my experience the bulk of my sales are still found with Amazon, but having the other vendors has given me the edge I needed to get what I wanted from Amazon. For the books I've made free both of them are series starters. The remainder of the books in each series are KDP select, which means they are available for free borrowing and Amazon pays me for the borrows. I've seen dramatic increases in borrows with this approach and with the books priced at $2.99 a borrow earns me just as much if not more than a sale.

Update - Amazon did finally match the price, so contacting them did work.

I was mostly paraphrasing with the offhand "We'll think about it" quote, but that was the tone of the first reply. It definitely didn't build any brand loyalty.

My experience as been exactly opposite of yours Tracey. Amazon has been a bunch of nothin' and some decent action from Smashwords. Possibly the difference between short stories and full length I have even thought of pulling out of Amazon from time to time. The only thing that has prevented me from doing so is that it costs me nothing to leave it alone. We'll see if some free stuff gains any traction.

Is Amazon getting slow on price matching?

I'm running a ten-day sale later this month and I was wondering how early I should lower my prices on the sites that let me go below $2.99 without a hassle in order to get Amazon to match the $1.99 in time for the sale. They did it in 24 hours for my perma-free short story.

OK so here's a Q - once a book is listed as free on KDP through price matching, can you get it to have a price again later? (Presumably by changing the Smashwords price back from zero?)

I'm interested in running a trial free promotion for a few months but I'm reluctant to set a book as free for evermore.

Anyone ever tried this?

Amber wrote: "Is Amazon getting slow on price matching?

I'm running a ten-day sale later this month and I was wondering how early I should lower my prices on the sites that let me go below $2.99 without a hass..."

In my personal experience Amazon has been very slow to price match. That may not be the case for everyone. It took over six months to get my first book matched. Contacting KDP support did not work for me. It took many months of clicking on the lower price button to get them to take notice. This second time around it only took a few weeks using the lower price button so it was faster then before but still took a few weeks.

Iain wrote: "OK so here's a Q - once a book is listed as free on KDP through price matching, can you get it to have a price again later? (Presumably by changing the Smashwords price back from zero?)

I'm inter..."

I have not tried to reverse a free price match, but it sounds like Amber may be attempting something similar since she only wants a temporary sale price matched, I assume for a short amount of time. Perhaps she has had luck with this is the past?

Amber wrote: "Is Amazon getting slow on price matching?"

I don't know but here's a really odd thing they did to me:

I have two free short stories that were price matched a while ago.

I also have a non-free novel, novella, and 4-story collection. I put these on Amazon at a higher retail price than elsewhere.

I notified Amazon of the price drops at Smashwords/B&N/Apple/Kobo when the non-free works got distributed.

Amazon dropped the prices on these non-free books, so they show up as discounted.

All's good...Until a couple weeks ago I notice that Amazon has hiked the prices of my non-free books back up to the retail price. While the free books remain free!

??WTF??

I've never done this with a sale before. I'm running my sale for ten days. This should be an adventure.

Tracey wrote: "The old adage goes, "The best way to sell a book is to write another one." This is especially true if you write books in series. I have found that when I run free promos on one book in a series the..."

I now have seven self-published books (novels and short story anthologie) and have recently noticed that none of these brings in income from Koll. When I queried this Kindle pointed out that none of them is on KDP Select. I am reluctant to put my latest books on Select, thus giving it exclusivity, but I was wondering about putting the first three (which form a trilogy) to see what happens. Has anyone tried putting earlier books on Kindle Select?

I have a total of 6 full length novels. The first three make up a trilogy. There is one stand-alone, and then the last two are part of a new series.

I used to have all of my books on KDP select, making them exclusive to Amazon and available for the Koll program. I have seen revenue from the Koll program as well as regular sales. In the last year I decided to remove my first book (book one of the trilogy) from the KDP program so that I could offer it free through the other venues and eventually get Amazon to match the price. I left books 2 and 3 of that series in the KDP select program. Now that book 1 is price matched free I've seen a significant increase in the "free" borrows of books 2 and 3, which generates revenue for me through Koll. It is because of this success that I decided to do the same thing with book 1 of the newest series.
I think when you have series books in particular making the first book free is very beneficial to sales of the rest. I choose to keep the rest of my books in a series as KDP select books so that I also receive the Koll revenue in addition to regular sales.

Thanks Tracey. But I thought if you kept your books on the KDP Select programme, you could not sell them through other venues, so I wonder if that doesn't defeat the object of getting more sales. Or have I got it wrong?

Only my first book in each series is free, available through other venues, not KDP select.
The follow up books in the series are exclusive to Amazon and in the KDP select program.
By keeping the first book out of KDP select I can offer it through the other venues for free and have Amazon match the free price. My goal here is to get the book free permanently on Amazon.
Once that book is free on Amazon the sales and borrows of the KDP select books increase on Amazon.

Tracey wrote: "Only my first book in each series is free, available through other venues, not KDP select.
The follow up books in the series are exclusive to Amazon and in the KDP select program.
By keeping the f..."

Tracey wrote: "Only my first book in each series is free, available through other venues, not KDP select.
The follow up books in the series are exclusive to Amazon and in the KDP select program.
By keeping the f..."

Thanks for trying to explain, but I don't understand how you can make any money if the book is free from another venue then matched free by Amazon. I think I give up.

It's not always about making money. A lot of writers (myself included) are just trying to get our books out in front of readers. If I concentrate on making money when only a few people each month buy my books, it will take forever for people to recognize me or at least to have heard of me. Obsessing on making a few sales each month for money is a case of putting the cart before the horse.

I haven't gotten to the point where I put my books up for free all the time, but I do free sales periodically just to get it out in front of readers.

J.D. wrote: "It's not always about making money. A lot of writers (myself included) are just trying to get our books out in front of readers. If I concentrate on making money when only a few people each month b..."

I agree, J.D., it's not always about making money, but it's not about losing it either (presumably). What I haven't yet understood is how giving books away free gets you more sales.

Sylvie wrote: Thanks for trying to explain, but I don't understand how you can make any money if the book is free from another venue then matched free by Amazon. I think I give up. "

Sylvie, I think what Tracey is trying to say is that she has written a series of books. She wants the first book in the series to be free permanently as a way to attract readers. Thus, you are correct that on Book 1, she makes no money. However, if she establishes a fan base, they will then come back and buy the remaining books in the series, which is where she does make money.

Fascinating thread! Thanks for all of the infor ladies and gents. My first novel is now FREE on Smashwords.
Schönling
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...

Michael wrote: "Sylvie wrote: Thanks for trying to explain, but I don't understand how you can make any money if the book is free from another venue then matched free by Amazon. I think I give up. "

Sylvie, I thi..."

Thanks Michael. Does that mean you make the first book free, but don't put the sequels on KDP Select.? I think I'm confusing KDP and KDP Select.

Sylvie wrote: "Tracey wrote: "Only my first book in each series is free, available through other venues, not KDP select.
The follow up books in the series are exclusive to Amazon and in the KDP select program.
B..."

I'm not making money on the free book. I'm making money on the other books in the series that are selling because they got the first book for free and liked it enough that they bought the others.
Making the first book free is basically a way of advertising the other books.

J.D. wrote: "It's not always about making money. A lot of writers (myself included) are just trying to get our books out in front of readers. If I concentrate on making money when only a few people each month b..."

Agreed J.D.! I think exposure to new fans in the long run earns more than a few sales. Gotta look at the big picture.

Sylvie wrote: "J.D. wrote: "It's not always about making money. A lot of writers (myself included) are just trying to get our books out in front of readers. If I concentrate on making money when only a few people..."

Since it costs me no money to self publish I'm not really losing money either and I am seeing a big jump in sales of my books that are not free. So for me it's worth it to give away a free book in order to gain fans and sell other books.