Scott Pack, of The Friday Project, thinks it will. He's undertaken a similar experiment with the ebook of his 21st Century Dodos and you can read his conclusions here. Scott gave his book away free for an entire month, whereas I enrolled in Kindle Select with mine, which ties you in exclusively to Kindle for three months and allows you five free promotional days. With the benefit of hindsight, this was a mistake for me as I would have preferred to make my novella free for more than just five days. The first of my promotional days was at the start of December, when I made the ebook free and tweeted about it. Between the US and the UK, it was downloaded roughly 350 times and led to a small spike in sales of its three sister books. I've since learned that I didn't really do enough; apparently, there are whole websites dedicated to matching the e-reading public to free ebooks and I should register with some of those.
My next free days are over Christmas and New Year, when I plan to be better armed for the experiment. Although I wouldn't make a habit of giving my work away for free, I do think it's interesting to see whether it's a worthwhile way of finding new readers. Watch this space...
2 comments:
Fascinating, Tamsyn. I'll be very interested to hear what happens with the Christmas/New Year promotion and related sales on your other Afterlifes. It's a whole new world out there for authors - a brave one - and I think 'added content' (which is what this really is) is going to be a big part of enhancing sales for those who have e-readers. Certainly, from my own experience, I've downloaded free books and , if I like them, looked for more by that author.
Thanks, Lucy. I agree that enhanced content is the way forward - will keep you posted about how it goes over the rest of the month!
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