"A beautifully original story. Loved the characters. I picked it up as a free book. But it would be worth the money. I would love to find a place like Paradise. So well written you can feel yourself standing among the story unfolding. Wonderfully heartwarming love story. Highly recommended."
For indie authors, making a book "perma-free" is
one of many marketing options. Basically this means offering a book for free, indefinitely.
Ideally it's one in a series, so if readers like the story, they will go out
and spend money on the others in the series.
For a while, I wasn't sure what I thought about this concept
– I mean, we work hard on our books! I didn't know if I wanted to just give a
title away. But The Promise of Paradise has been out for a year now, and done
relatively well sales-wise, so I thought I'd give it a try. First off, though, you
can't just set a book's price to $0.00 on Amazon (if you participate in the
Amazon KDP program, you can offer your book for free for 5 days every 3 months,
but I wanted to see what would happen for a longer period of time). So you have
to "price match," which basically means making it free in other sales
channels (like Smashwords, the popular website for indie authors) and then hope
once sites like Barnes and Noble or Sony make it free, Amazon will follow suit.
It took about a week, but Amazon did finally make The Promise of Paradise free. This happened one week ago Tuesday. Within a day, it
was climbing some of Amazon's "Top Free" lists, and by Thursday it
was #1 in Women's Fiction and Romance. I think it got as high as #45 on the Top
Free overall list. Not bad, especially since I didn't do a whole lot of
marketing besides tweeting and posting on Facebook about it.
BookBub, a popular email subscription service authors
can pay to have their titles listed with, gives a range of 21,000 for Contemporary
Romance downloads and 14,000 for Women's Fiction downloads if you advertise with
them. In the week it's been free, I've had just over 8000 downloads of
The Promise of Paradise, so I'm pretty happy with that (since I've spent $0 on advertising it). Beyond that, I've sold
an additional 30 books of Beacon of Love, my other new title, and I attribute
those sales to the free downloads, since I do have an excerpt in the back of
The Promise of Paradise and tell readers that they'll see a familiar character
in Beacon of Love.
Another plus: I've gotten 4 new 5-star reviews on Amazon,
which is terrific. That means that The Promise of Paradise is getting to people
who have never read anything by me before and will hopefully want to read more.
It turns out the perma-free thing has more benefits than I
would have thought. Certainly sales of my other books aren't through the roof,
but they've definitely picked up. I'm reaching new readers. And I'm still in
the Top 10 of both Free lists in Women's Fiction and Romance, which means many Amazon
customers are seeing the title when they're browsing those categories. The fun
thing is that I have control over all of this – another plus when it comes to
indie publishing!
