Zestful Blog Post #150
Thought you might be interested in some facts and figures
today. Over last weekend and into this week I put The Actress up for free on Amazon Kindle, for the full 5-day period
allowed, from Friday through Tuesday. Initially I thought I’d just make it free
through Sunday (Oscar) night, but decided to leave it up the whole time,
because it was doing so well.
First, context. My fiction is all in the Amazon ‘Select’
program, meaning the books are only available in e-book form on Amazon Kindle.
The benefits, so far, are worth it to me. The vast majority of e-books are sold
on Amazon, and if your books are in the Select program, you get more exposure
and more money. This isn’t necessarily meant to be a ringing endorsement of the
program, it’s just to explain why I, an author who values simplicity, am
sticking with it for now. Your ‘Select’ books can be read for ‘free’ by readers
who have signed up for Kindle Unlimited or KU (they pay $9.95 per month for
unlimited access), and for actual free by readers who own a Kindle device (via the
Kindle Owners Lending Library, or KOLL).
Free is good. You reach readers this way who wouldn’t
necessarily find and buy your books on their own. The immediate benefit is that
you, the author, get paid per page of free material read. It’s a fraction of a
cent per page, but it adds up (example below). The extended benefit, of course,
is that some readers who like your work will read and buy more and become fans.
Last week’s promo was the first time The Actress was free to anyone who wanted it. On Friday when my
newschat and blog about it went out, readers downloaded it 2,629 times. Saturday:
1,408. Sunday: 731. Kind of a geometric progression. To my surprise, the book quickly reached #1 in the Amazon
free store in the legal thriller category, and it ranged between 8th
and 11th in the female sleuth category. It also broke into the top
100 free books overall, reaching #63 at its best.
Meanwhile, not much happened with my other titles, which, I’ve
found, is typical when a free promo is running. My sales and free pages read were
suffering from the winter blues, and I hoped this promo would help. The bump,
if you’re going to get one, generally comes after the free promo is over.
As of Sunday night the book was still the #1 free legal
thriller, so I decided to let the promo go the maximum time, through Tuesday,
just to see if the ranking would hold, even though free downloads were slowing way
down.
On Monday 400 more readers downloaded the book, and on
Tuesday 427 did. A few spilled into Wednesday given international time zones:
17. So total: 5,612. That’s a lot of potential readers. Now, authors have
learned that not everybody who downloads your freebie reads it, but a bunch
will get to it, sooner or later. The book’s rank dropped to #2 and then #4 in
free legal thrillers as of Tuesday afternoon, then I stopped keeping track.
Sales of my other books have bumped up a little in the last
couple of days, but it’s too early to tell how well that will go or how long it
will last. Mainly it’s the KU and KOLL pages read that have soared. As soon as
the promo started, they jumped from dismally below 1,000 per day to way over that.
Yesterday KU and KOLL readers made it through 3,776 of my pages. As I’m writing
this midday today, about a thousand pages have been read.
[There was a bit of a bump for the quickie free promo of Easy Street I ran earlier in February,
but the big spike is the result of The
Actress promo.]
Let’s say you average 3,000 free pages a day. At .0058 cents
per page, which is the last I figured it, that equals $522 in a 30-day month.
Not a king’s ransom, but nothing to sneeze at.
I’m ramping up my promo work for my books, primarily by
writing and planning more releases. I’ve been talking a little bit about Crimes in a Second Language; stay tuned
for more on that this month.
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