How to Increase Your Book Sales with a Free Offer

Are you planning to increase your ebook sales with a free offer but are afraid it won’t work? I’ve been pricing the first novel in my series for free (on and off) for a while now, so I know that you can increase your book sales with a free offer. But, you need to have a strategy.

First, you need to decide whether to make your book permanently free (“permafree”) or whether to run short sweet campaigns with your free offer.

I have run both permafree and short free campaigns on several of my titles over the ten or so years I’ve been self-publishing my books. I know that offering your book for free works, but I also know that the best results are achieved when there is a firm plan in place.

A Free Book Offer Isn’t For Everybody

You should not offer your book for free if you don’t have another book, or, ideally, several published books at regular price on offer too. The way you make money from free offers is to get follow-on sales or so-called “read-through” on your other books. If readers love your free book, they will come back and buy your other titles.

It’s ideal if your books are in a series, but this isn’t always the case. You can achieve good read-through – or even increase the sales of the free offer after the promotion has ended – if you have a strong brand. If all of your books are very similar, have covers which tell the readers that they are your books, and which clearly belong to a genre, a free offer can work wonders for your back-list books.

Although I am mainly going to be talking about fiction in this post, these rules also apply to nonfiction. If your books are all about the same subject matter, you could offer the first of many titles free and see if the read-through works in your favour.

Whether your books are exclusively sold by Amazon or you are marketing them widely with several ebook sellers, will also inform your choice on whether to offer a book for free or not. If you are in Kindle Unlimited, or KU, (ie exclusively with Amazon) you are only allowed to offer a title for free 5 days out of 90. This is often enough to set up a promotion, but no good if you have decided to plump for a permafree offer. You can get around this annoying rule by publishing that book wide and asking Amazon to match the $0 price.

Should You Pay to Advertise a Free Offer?

Writers are often told not to pay to market free books. And on the face of it, this makes sense. Surely a free title would sell itself on Amazon and other online retailers, without having to throw money at it? Besides, if you are not getting a return on the sales because the book is free, how can you spend money on it? But, and this is a big but, this argument doesn’t factor in follow-on sales.

Up till now, I, too, have been reluctant to spend big bucks on promoting a free offer. Below are my experiences of offering my books for free.

Permafree

My strategy for the past few years has been to have The English Heart, Book 1 in The Nordic Heart Series permanently free. This has had some moderate success, but this has several complications.

Firstly, The English Heart is included in a four-novel boxset, which has been one of my best-selling titles since its publication in February 2018. Having one of the books free means that the pricing has to remain low, in order for the boxset to appear good value for the reader. This also means that if I want to have the boxset in Kindle Unlimited, I can’t keep Book 1 on a permanently free offer.

Secondly,  it’s also much more difficult to get good advertising, such as an ENT (Ereader News Today) or a BookBub feature, with a ‘permafree’ book.

Early this spring, I decided to take all my books into the Kindle Unlimited. The 2-3 titles which I use as reader magnets will still remain available widely, as I do not wish to break Amazon’s rules by giving them free to new subscribers. So I needed to build up my audience exclusively on Amazon. But being in KU, I had to make the difficult decision to remove The English Heart from its permafree status and pursue a different marketing strategy for both of my series.

I have noticed a slight loss of read-through, but because I was planning to rewrite The English Heart anyway (the new version is out now), I decided to put this series on a back burner while I concentrate on marketing my latest novels.

The Island Affair

To boost the launch of Book 3, The Island Daughter, in my second Nordic fiction series this summer, I decided to offer the first book, The Island Affair, free for the first time. I advertised it via social media, and to my mailing list. The additional advertising was the low-cost kind, an email shot via FreeBooksy and Fussy Librarian, and a boosted Instagram post. This method had moderate success – there was a hike in downloads (948 for the free title and 12,147 KU pages read).

The free promotion was followed by a $0.99 one, with an Ereader News Today feature. These are more difficult to get than some others and a little more expensive, which is why it was perfect for the $0.99 offer.

For me, this strategy worked. I had an increased read-through for Book 2 in the series, and the launch of The Island Daughter was the best I’ve had. Below is a chart showing the free offer and the hike in sales when the ENT mailing went out on July 1st 2020.

BookBub

Bookbub has been lauded as some kind of magic wand to increase sales. As well as difficult to get, both Featured Deals and Featured New Releases, are eye-watering expensive, but they definitely boost sales. Whether they boost sales enough to make them pay is another matter. Which is why I have been reluctant to apply to promote a free offer.

Until this autumn.

In September I managed to get a worldwide deal (which means the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and India) with BookBub for The Island Affair. I set another free Kindle promotion for five days. I supported the BB deal with ads with Freebooksy and Fussy Librarian and continued to run my AMS ads (removing the free book for the five days of the free offer). I didn’t run any BookBub ads after the feature, but I was active on social media and reminded my mailing list on several occasions about the free offer.

As a result, the book had nearly 22,000 free downloads and 117,000 KU reads. Sales of all the novels and the prequel short story (The Day We Met) in the series, as well as the boxset, covered the cost of the ad plus the same amount on top in the following 30 days. (See chart below)

That’s a pretty good return on investment, wouldn’t you say?

None of my previous promotions has done this well. Usually, I would just about break even with a Bookbub promotion where the book was priced at $0.99. This one was the first one where I offered a title for free.

Since this promotion, my sales have remained high and I have already tripled my sales this year compared to 2019. I have published two titles, which is one less than last year, but I am also getting better results with my Amazon ads.

A Marketing Mix

As you can see, a free offer can boost sales significantly.

But, if all you do is offer one title free, this will not alone bring you increased sales, even if you have several books out for readers to buy after they’ve read the free title. There are exceptions, of course, but there is a limit to how many readers you can attract by just a free offer.

As with everything to do with marketing, it’s the mix that matters.

My experience shows that if you plan a promotion carefully, it will bring results.

As an indie author, you have to constantly test and try out different methods of advertising and marketing to find the perfect strategy. But starting with a free offer (provided you have other books for readers to buy) is a good way to gauge the market and the book’s attractiveness to readers. If you get many downloads of the free title, but the follow-on sales are poor, there might be something about the book that isn’t appealing to that particular readership. Perhaps you need to look at the content – or the targeting.

In January, I am going to post a comprehensive marketing strategy, which I have found works for me. It’s a strategy that I have found through trial and error (more error, I should say!), and it will naturally not work for everybody. But I hope it will give you some guidance when navigating the difficult waters of book marketing.

Free Offer to Boost Your Mailing List

You can also use a free offer to attract email subscribers, which in turn will increase your sales indirectly. It’s much more difficult to measure how many more sales you achieve this way, but it is important to have a solid, loyal group of readers if you are aiming to make money out of your writing. This is the audience that you can sell your forthcoming titles first to, so the larger your email subscriber list is, the more successful each new book launch is. (Read here my tips and tricks on how to have a successful book launch)

The free offer for an email list can also be something else than a full novel. I use extra, unpublished chapters from my books, first chapters from a forthcoming title, novellas, and short stories as free giveaways (also called reader magnets) to attract email subscribers. I tend to keep the full-length novels for running separate campaigns through BookFunnel And BookSweeps.

I hope you’ve found this post useful. Any questions, just post your comment below!

Write Every Day

My book, WRITE EVERY DAY, with advice and practical tips on how to establish a sustainable writing routine, is now out in Kindle and paperback! You can find both here.

WANT TO SEE MORE POSTS LIKE THIS? SIGN UP TO SELF PUBLISHING TIPS TO GET NEW POSTS DROPPED STRAIGHT INTO YOUR MAILBOX.