Sunday, May 28, 2017

Finally - An Effective, Low-cost Way to Promote KDP FREE Days!

The competition in the fiction market is fierce. If you're like me, the problem you face is not that readers don't like your story. It's the fact you're having a hard time getting your stories in front of readers.

Thus, the logic behind using KDP Select Free days, giving your book away for free in order to give readers a chance to "find" your books. Granted, it wrankles a bit to give away something so much time, effort and passion has been invested in, not to mention money, but, you have to help your audience find you.

Since my books are part of a series, I accepted the fact long ago the first book in the series will have to be a loss leader. It will either be free or for sale for .99 cents. Someday in the future is will likely become permafree.

If as an author you are going to give away free copies of your book as part of your marketing strategy, be it to find readers, gain reviews or try to boost sales of other titles in the series, you want to maximize your KDP Free days.

Experimenting with this marketing tactic can be a but frustrating as KDP only allows the author five days per 90 day enrollment period to give away books. Patience is not high on my list of traits when I'm trying to figure out how to best perform a task.

Enrolling your book in individual book promotion services is a time consuming, frustrating task and to be honest, not always particularly effective.

Book Marketing Tools offers a low cost, quick tool that allows an author to list their free days for a mere $29. For twenty minutes of my time and $29, my KDP FREE days were listed on 27 sites that feature free ebooks and have e-mail lists.

The result?

I gave away 3375 copies of The Predator and The Prey in just three days. 

To put that in perspective, the previous best giveaway for that novel was 475 copies in three days.

If I'm going to give it away, then I want to give away as many copies as possible. The KENP pages read for the sequel, Last Train to Nowhere, jumped from 0 to over 2,000 in just a few days and I sold 27 copies at $3.99 in the same time period, so I at least broke even.

In what is certain to be a marathon if I am to reach the size audience I hope to, this is a marketing tactic I will return to repeatedly.

No comments:

Post a Comment