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Blogs by Gabriel Boutros
What Will a Free Kindle Promo Do For Your Book? 8/31/2013 9:37:49 AM
I had promised myself that I'd never do another free Kindle promo, the logic behind giving my work away for free escaping me. I'd tried it once in the first weeks that The Guilty went on sale, with very little publicity, and got a few hundred downloads and not much else. "Forget that idea," I told myself. Still, I kept reading posts on-line from various independent authors who said that their successful promos led to an uptick in sales from word of mouth and the additional reviews that are so essential in driving book sales. They said an author had to publicize and market his Kindle promo all over the place, get in readers' faces and demand that they scoop up his book for free. Instead of a few hundred downloads, a few thousand could be expected if I worked hard enough. So what was there to lose, I asked myself, except those precious royalties which drip into my bank account with the speed of an IV? I did my research and discovered that there were several sites that listed free Kindle days. Some of them charged premiums in order to guarantee a prominent place for a book, but I wasn't quite ready to pay to have people read my book. I decided I'd advertise on the many free listings that were available and see what that got me.
Well, I'm half-way through my three-day event, and I'm closing in on 4000 downloads. Holy cow!! I just checked out Amazon.com and The Guilty was #2 on their Kindle listings for legal thrillers. Holy cow again!!
So I'm obviously hoping that some of the readers who got a free copy of my book will like it enough to tell their friends about it, or to post on-line reviews. At the same time, no matter what happens in terms of book sales, I'm pretty amazed by the idea that people in countries as far away as Italy, Japan and India will be reading my little novel. As entrepreneurial as we all get, and as conscious of royalties as we are, in the end what every writer wants is to know that people are reading his work. I have been given that satisfaction and more!
With the promo ending tomorrow, September 1, I look forward to seeing by how far I can surpass my own limited expectations.
