The Experiment with Cheap E-books Continues

[I. J. Parker]

We have some other threads on pricing.  It's a controversial subject.  The idea of offering 99 c. novels or freebies to get high "sales" stats started more than a year ago.  Joe Konrath made that work for him.  He was very good about sharing his story and his income, and a multitude of previously unpublished folk threw their work up on Kindle etc.  Amazon started listing sales and freebies separately.  Since then the playing field has changed.  Kindleboards is full of very hostile posts about the trash people publish and try to sell for 99 c.  Or give it away.  Low prices and freebies have gotten a bad name and readers are being warned away.

Then came Amazon Select.  Amazon Select lets Amazon Prime subscribers borrow titles for free.  The author who makes titles available gets a single 5-day promotion when one of the titles will be free to everyone.  We don't know yet if that promotion will pay off.

 

For what it's worth:  DREAM OF A SPRING NIGHT , Book One of the HOLLOW REED trilogy

(Historical fiction set in 12th c. Japan) will be free, starting today.  I'll report on how that worked out.

 

If anyone else has subscribed to the Amazon Select deal, please share your results.

[EDWARD C MORGAN]

I suppose Amazon does not provide you with email addresses of those who download the book? That would form the foundation for some powerful follow up marketing.

I also wonder if they provide the emails to publishers of people who download samples?

[Dana King]

Oh, God, I hope not. It's not like their marketing isn't aggressive enough already.

[I. J. Parker]

No.  I can see privacy concerns in this.  Publishers wouldn't bother with it anyway. Contacting ones fans is time consuming work.

[I. J. Parker]

On the third day of my experiment, my ranking has dropped to 24 for historical novels.  This probably again suggests that it's better to split the 5-day allowance into separate dates.

[Susan]

Thank you all for sharing your results on this thread. I've been thinking about doing the KDP Select with my two crime thrillers and this has convinced me to do it. I'll be out of town for a while, can't do it till February. But once I  do it, I'll report back. Louisa Locke reported on another list that she had great download numbers when she offered one of her historical mysteries free for 2 days, more than 14K downloads, bumped her to #9 in historical mystery. And her sales numbers for next few days were in the hundreds. 

Good luck to all with sales!

[I. J. Parker]

Thanks and thanks for sharing Locke's example.  It's good to know that we're not alone as we're trying to go it alone.  :)