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| F is for Fossil, the inspiration for the MY ZOMBIE DOG |
If you've been following my blog, twitter or wireless telegraphs, you'll probably know I've release My Zombie Dog and have tried a few different promotions with this book. One of those promotions was the KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) FREE day. For the three months that you sign your book solely to Kindle, you can elect up to five days to have your ebook available for FREE on Amazon.
I have no concerns about trying different marketing/promotions with this book. It's my first release and I'm happy to learn from the experience for the next books coming out this year. I do have concerns sometimes about the bigger picture. I need to make sure the decisions I make are not positive for this one book but detrimental to the Indie ebook industry as a whole.
My concern with free is an old philosophy I have, 'don't think you're doing your client/employer a favour by decreasing the cost of your service, in the end that is what they will think it is worth and will resent paying normal price'. I came across this article that made me worry that free, 99c, $1.99 ebooks are devaluing the book as a concept.
So what if my book is downloaded thousands of times, if it's free is that helping sales? Turns out it does.
- Each time someone downloads my book it lifts in the rankings, bringing it to more people's attention. MY ZOMBIE DOG reached number 2 in children's free 'Spine-chilling Horror'.
- People download multiple books, so in future when someone is browsing a book, underneath it says Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought... and you increase the chance of your book showing up there.
- My book received a lot of tweets and sales at regular price spiked the next day. This was my second best day of sales since release.
As a customer, for me the novelty of free books is wearing off, I don't mind paying for books, in fact I prefer to. But obviously free is still popular with a lot of readers. Perhaps it will also result in more reviews which may help sales as well.
I'm still investigating the affect of free on the Indie book industry, but here are two articles with varying opinions:
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