Book Marketing 101: Free Content

We want to thank Brenna Lyons for offering This series in support of Small Press Month. Her experience as a senior editor, President of EPICauthors, and a 20 book (in print) published author is invaluable for our authors.

Book Marketing 101

By Brenna Lyons

http://www.brennalyons.com/ http://www.myspace.com/brennalyons


Free content-

Ah, a topic close to my heart.

The practice of offering a free download to stimulate sales is far from new, actually...even in the realm of e-publishing. Baen has been doing it for years with the Free Library. http://www.baen.com/library/ Now, Baen has only started selling e-books, as well, in the last few years. Originally, they were giving away the first book in a series to encourage sales of the entire series IN PRINT. And, it worked. It worked really well.

An offshoot of Baen's library that several indie/e publishers picked up on and ran with, after seeing it in practice with Baen...was offering a CD e-book version of a book with the print version sold. Now, obviously this wouldn't work for books sent from the printer directly, but authors selling at conventions were encouraged to include a CD burn of the book in the print book sold. Now, this doesn't necessarily increase sales as much as it is a convenience for readers to have the e-version and print version to read. However, if that CD is passed along, it certainly could increase sales.

Fictionwise (http://fictionwise.com/), back in 2005, decided to do a modified version of the free library setup. They gave away the first book in a series in e-book for a week to stimulate the sales of the e-books. How well did it work? Phenomenally well. I was one of the invited authors, since I had several series with them and was a bestseller at my publisher. We gave away copies of Night Warriors. In the week, the average book gave away 1577 copies. Night Warriors was downloaded 3008 times.

Scary? Not a bit. Why? Because, in the aftermath, the sales of all of my e-books at Fictionwise doubled, INCLUDING Night Warriors, which means that people who read it sent other people to buy it. In the weeks after that promotion, my daily site hits jumped to TEN TIMES normal, crashing two early versions of my site and forcing me to split the whole onto six separate web spaces to avoid another crash.

Now, I'd done free giveaways myself before that time, especially on my site. The most successful contest I have ever held was for 4 printed and signed copies of a short story in one of my series. Later, that story was released as a free e-book read on my site. Then it released for sale...and it did sell well. It is currently offered as a free read on ARe (AllRomanceeBooks) http://allromanceebooks.com/

Fictionwise does free reads now, but when we've inquired about them, we've been told that there is an upload fee to offer it for free. ARe doesn't charge that upload fee. I'd much rather concentrate my free reads on my site, my publisher site and ARe than pay someone else to offer it for free for me, no matter how well-known the distribution site is. I'm hoping that FW will take a page from ARe and start offering the free downloads with free upload.

Then you get the extreme models.
http://torrentfreak.com/alchemist-author-pirates-own-books-080124/ IOW, pirating your own books in e-book to increase sales. This is akin to the Baen model, obviously. Instead of the publisher site offering the e-book to people, it's just released into BitTorrent and allowed to download and pass.



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