Meh
Really, let’s break down the reasoning, the process and the results of a free Amazon eBook giveaway. That’s right, prospective readers were offered a $5.99 Kindle eBook for absolutely free with no strings.
Would seem to be a no-brainer for parents of kid’s who love reading chapter books in this case. My first children’s book, “Pochi Was Here: Pochi Visits the Land of the Rising Sun,” is an adventure chapter book for kids 7-11. It is available in softcover and as an eBook. It teaches kids about Japan, some words in the Japanese language, some major attractions like the cities of Osaka, Tokyo and Kyoto; all while having some fun seeing it all through the eyes of a thinking stuffed dog: Pochi.
What could be more fun and a better deal than a great chapter book, a good read and a completely free, no-obligation download? Seems like it should be a run-away success; right?
Here is the reality for other authors, children’s books or romance or fantasy, or any genre. Marketing is the most challenging part of being an indie, self-published author. It’s even a challenge for those who have a marketing background; like me.
Here is the background on my book promo; what I did, the platforms I used, the length of the promotion and the end results.
Set Up Your Free Book Promotion
I started by informing Amazon that I intended to do a free giveaway of the book for 5 days. I let them know two weeks ahead of time. This can be done through the KDP Marketing tab (more information here) This allows you to set up a give-away and promote a free book. I elected to run my free book promotion for 5 consecutive days. Once that has been set up, you can move on to your marketing/notification platforms.
There are two approaches to marketing your give-away. I elected to go the 100% free route. In hindsight, do I think this is the best way to go? Probably not; but here is my reasoning.
When I wrote my first book, I was at the beginning portion of the learning curve, although I had done a lot of research and watched many videos. My book had really taken 10 years from conception to publication because it was returned to the back-burner many times. I am a working writer and the writing that puts food on the table comes first.
With this first book, I had hired a line editor, hired three different illustrators before deciding the third was by far the best, and even hired a book formatter, which turned out to be a waste of money. I’m sure there are many very competent people in this vocation; I just hired one who wasn’t ready for prime time.
In all, my book cost me nearly $1,200 to bring to market and really wasn’t returning hardly any of that investment. Also, initially, I had gone with my illustrator’s suggested trim size, not realizing that a custom trim size means less profit. With the initial public price of the book I had chosen, it was returning a whopping 7 cents per sale. I increased the price and reduced the wholesale discount. That brought the profit per book up substantially, but the fact that I was so under-water with the book meant that I did not want to throw good money after bad and spend a lot to promote the free book.
Why a Free Book Giveaway?
The reasons for doing a free book promotion of an eBook are to get a lot of downloads and hope that you also get cross-over sales if you have other books, as well as reviews and ratings. These last two factor into Amazon’s algorithm and probably Barnes & Noble’s algorithm, just like certain factors influence YouTube videos. If you want your book “suggested,” you have to convince the algorithm that the book is good and that it is worthy of suggestion. It is an unfortunate catch-22 if you are not getting reviews and ratings because you are not getting sales. Then, your book is invisible and it isn’t recommended by the bookseller and your poor book languishes as another indie/self-published book that has less than 100 sales.
I really hate some of the realities of book publishing and sales versus the effort and time an author devoted to making something they thought would be treasured by readers.
In light of my determination to go the “free route,” I added some additional social media channels to the ones I already had. I have two dedicated websites for my three children’s books that I had built a long time ago. I had bought the domain names at least months before the books were published. (PochiBooks Here and The Terrible Insects Here) I had also watched a video by an author in France where she outlined a few websites that would promote a free book at no cost. I thought that this was perfect. (more about that in a minute) Also, I located about 8 or 9 pages on Facebook that were specifically for promoting books, and some were specifically for free eBooks. Besides Facebook, I utilized pages on Twitter and Instagram as well. I even did a few posts on Linkedin.
The Promotion Begins
I created a nice graphic announcement that was eye-catching from a template on Canva. I posted the graphic, along with a short description and hashtags starting a day or two before the promotion period. I interspersed the graphic with inside images from the book, along with a description and hashtags. In all cases, I also included a shortened link I made with TinyURL that went to the Amazon page for the book. I have three different pages on Instagram dedicated to either this specific book, all of my books or my personal IG page. I have the same set up on Facebook. I have a dedicated page on Twitter. On all the different pages and platforms, I posted messages/ads each day.
There were also the websites suggested by the author in France. Those websites included “It’s Write Now,” “Best Book Monkey” and “Reading Deals.” The author in France had fairly good luck with this approach, but there was apparently one crucial difference between my book and hers. Reading Deals requires at least 4 reviews and average 4-star ratings before they will consider your book. My book had one review under the paperback version, and Amazon transferred that to the original eBook, but I had unpublished the original eBook and created a better version that was a 2nd edition. Amazon had never transferred the review over to the new eBook. Other platforms have these “editorial requirements” as well.
For It’s Write Now, an author can submit their book for consideration for a free promotion, but they didn’t accept my book. This meant that I needed to find at least one other service that might be free on my own.
I decided to try to use Free Booksy. You can request a free promotion with them, but they choose very few submissions and mine wasn’t one of them. You can purchase a Freebooksy “feature,” which for a children’s book is $45, to be put on a list to 100,000 email subscribers. This is one of the cheapest genres they offer.
The only truly free service that came through for my book was Best Book Monkey. (Bronze Book Promotion) They had a very prominent ad on their website and maybe my book was included in an email also. They also have paid promotions.
The Good and the Bad
The most exciting part of the entire experience was that the day before my promotion ended, my book was #3 on Amazon’s best sellers list for free eBook chapter books. That is out of the top 100 in a category that included more than 3,200 books. That was very exciting to see. The promotion ended two days ago and the book only has one (5-star) rating and no reviews. I won’t say exactly how many downloads and KENP read numbers resulted from all the work, but let’s just say it was underwhelming compared to what I expected.
The book is in the hands of many people, but whether or not they will read the book, or it was just a freebie, is yet to be seen. Compared to the results the French author had, it was disappointing. I guess if you are a romance or fantasy author, you may have better results. After all, kids are not the ones making this download decision; I would guess.
Lessons Learned
Very soon, I will be putting in the work to convert my other two books to Kindle eBooks. I have learned a lot on that front also. I am sure I will do a promotion for my more recent chapter book: “The Terrible Insects.” This is a very funny book that should have a lot of sales even without a promotion. Yet, it is likely invisible. What I will do with that book is use the lower-priced packages offered by many of the promotion websites and just bite the bullet. I think that you get what you pay for. Yes, the book cost a fair amount for the illustrations, but I think the potential ROI with paid promotions could be more rewarding.
My suggestion would be that if you wrote a romance novel, fantasy novel, a mystery or thriller, then give the free route a try and maybe you will find a bigger audience. With the social media platforms, be prepared to get lots of messages from people who promise to promote your book for a price. I had to block several because the spam got to be irritating. I believe I may also make a video about this topic because I believe it can help authors, for the same reason that I have the Indie Author Resources page on this website. (which will grow over time)
Best of luck with whatever route you decide to take. You may also try a reduced price promotion; another option that Amazon and all the marketing platforms offer. I have seen some authors say that a .99 cent promotion is better than the free one. It would be good to hear your experience in comments. In the end, this helps other indie authors and saves them the trouble of possibly wasting time and effort with little to show for it.
(UPDATE: The eBook now has two 5-star ratings, but no reviews, as of 3/14/24, two weeks after my initial post above. The paperback version remains with one review and one rating)
© 2024 K Richard Douglas
