Giving Away Ebooks on Amazon.com

by John Kremer on Saturday, October 29th, 2011 | No Comments

20% off during May 2012

Question:

Is it possible to push Amazon into dropping your Kindle ebook price to $0.00 by selling it for $0.00 on Smashwords or other platforms?

John’s Answer:

I know of at least one book author who had given his book away on Smashwords and even though he set a $4.99 price on Kindle at Amazon.com, Amazon picked up the free ebook at Smashwords and gave away 12,000 copies of his book in just a few days.

Answer from Mark Horner:

We at eBook Partnership had a similar experience but with a free book on Apple’s iBookstore rather than Smashwords. It was an intentional marketing move on our behalf. The free book was the first of a two-parter, and once Amazon dropped the price, we shifted tens of thousands of the free book.

It took a couple of weeks for any effect on the second (paid for) book to kick in, but sales of that were 10 times higher than for any other paid-for title in this particular author’s portfolio.

John’s Response:

That’s one of the major reasons to give a book away: To build sales for future books, products, and services.

John Kremer

John Kremer is the author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books. If you want to launch a SuperStar Blog Tour™, Mega Blog Tour™, or Blogpalooza™, watch this space for news in the coming week.