I was about 12 when my hair went from entirely straight to very, very frizzy. It had become curly, but no one in my family recognized that yet. My 10-year-old brother, however, knew I had a problem. Kids at school had begun to mock me for my halo of frizz. So when, at the local pharmacy, my brother noticed sample packets of a product called Frizz-Ease, he filled his pockets with the freebies.
My parents saw his bulging pockets as we were exiting the car at home, and his secret ploy to bring my broke-ass some class was divulged. My parents explained that the free packets were to entice people to try a new product, so taking all of them worked to harm the company. They weren’t meant to be used in perpetuity. We were meant to try it, and then if we liked it, buy it. We returned the excess samples with our apologies, and the Frizz-Ease we did purchase helped me learn to tame my mop.
Does free still work to sell books?
But it also taught me an early lesson about marketing. In author groups, I regularly hear people say, “Free doesn’t work!” Or they say, “The market’s flooded with free books, so making yours free just devalues books further.” Or I sometimes hear, “I made my book free, and then I didn’t sell any others.” Or, “People have too many free books. That’s why it doesn’t work.”
Often, we don’t want to hear the uncomfortable truth, and in this case, it can be a painful one. If your first book in a series is free and you don’t sell any books in the rest of the series, you likely have a craft problem. But in this way a free book can be an effective litmus test to discover whether something’s working. When your series does work, free can be an amazing marketing tool, and below I’ll discuss the types of promotions I use to maximize its effectiveness.
First, let’s run the numbers to show that free can work for you.
How much does it cost to move my free book?
Making your book free is still marketing 101. You can spend a lot of money to convince people to shell out big bucks on an unknown product, like Frizz-Ease, or you can spend much, much less to convince them to try a new product when it’s available as a free sample. The costs in that instance are largely the “costs” of the actual free product itself.
The good news for authors is that giving away ebooks is quite inexpensive, in a per-unit calculation. Sure, we spent money on editing, covers, etc., but the actual cost we pay to deliver each unit is zero. Our biggest cost, then, comes from bringing potential readers to our product page, where we aim to convince them to download and hopefully read it. After that, our job is to convince them that they want more.
Compared to other products, books are easy to give away, but not every free book is created equal. Some books easily convert readers who reach the landing page, while others have a lower “hit” rate. And the relative ease with which we can give away a free book is an important factor in how well a promotion works. In fact, it’s one of the most important factors in determining whether a free book promotion will be revenue-positive.
I have six different series of books under my fantasy pen name, and four series under my romantic women’s fiction pen name. Some of my fantasy pen name books are so off-the-beaten-path that giving a copy away is difficult. For other series, such as The Birch Creek Ranch series under my B. E. Baker pen name, it’s very easy to give away a free book. This is partly because of the size of its potential audience — The Birch Creek Ranch is women’s fiction, which broadly appeals to a large group. I also have a clear and simple tagline for the series, which I believe has contributed to its success, and the plot/story hooks at the end of each book also increase reader retention.
That leads me to the second most important part of this calculation: how much money a free download generates for your series. Calculating the total revenue per free download will help you determine at what cost a free promotion is worth doing.
What’s my estimated return on each free unit?
Here’s how to calculate this amount for a series:
- Take a period for which the first book in a series was free. Three to six months works best, but the first book in the series must be consistently free for that period or it will skew your data.
- Take the total series revenue for that period and divide it by the total number of book one copies that were given away. This gives you the revenue per free download.
You do need to calculate this separately for each platform. For my eight-book Birch Creek Ranch series, if you look at downloads of the free first book on Amazon, I averaged $1.46 per free download when I only had four books out (the first time it was free). The last time I made it free, when the series was complete with eight books, I averaged $3.80 per free download. On Nook, now that I have eight books, I average more like $5.60 per free download, even now, years after the first book released and on the third of three “free first book” runs.
(Side note: On top of being my easiest first-in-series book to give away, this series is also my highest earning per free download. I think there’s a connection here. Books that more people want to download are probably more often read and sometimes more quickly read, even when they’re freebies.)
If you contrast that with my YA fantasy Anchored series, a four-book series that’s much harder to give away — on that series, I make about $0.088 per free download. That’s right. EIGHT POINT EIGHT cents per free download.
When you look at how much you make per free download, you can get an idea of what promotional methods you might be able to use to boost the book and still yield a profit.
Which free promotions can help me sell more books?
Here are a few strategies I use to promote my free books, and how I profit from each. I’ve ranked them by most effective (for me) to least:
Paid newsletters
Of course, my top pick for any free promotion, and the industry-wide gold standard, is a BookBub Featured Deal. BookBub has spent years curating a customer base that is all readers. That alone makes it more targeted than Facebook or other cost-per-click ads can be (more on those later). When you take the relatively high cost of the Featured Deal and divide it by the (also high) total free downloads, it puts the promotion value into perspective. Featured Deals have the single lowest cost per free download of any other promotion I’ve run, which means they can yield the highest profit per free download.
Let me give you an example.
I have a book that has been free for a long time, more or less constantly since the middle of 2021. I ran a third BookBub Featured Deal on the book on March 5, 2023, for a cost of $665. I gave away 9,533 copies on that day on Amazon alone. (I would normally consider any higher-than-usual downloads in the next few days as coming from the same feature, and this calculation only includes Amazon, but you get an idea.) Meanwhile, I ran a Fussy Librarian newsletter feature on March 13 for $57, and I gave away 253 copies. On April 11, I did a Book Cave feature for $44 and gave away 199 copies. The cost of each free download was as follows:
- BookBub: 7 cents per free download
- Fussy Librarian: 23 cents per free download
- Book Cave: 22 cents per free download
This series makes me an average of about 48 cents per free download of book one, so this feature likely made me about $4,500 on Amazon. When you subtract the $665 cost, there’s a profit (again, from Amazon on the day of the feature alone) of right around $4,000. By comparison, I made a $64 profit on Fussy and $51 profit on Book Cave, both also on Amazon alone on the actual day of the promo. Since I publish my books wide, I also had downloads on Nook, Apple, Kobo, and Google Play. Once you factor in my downloads and average revenue per free download on other retailers, you can see that one BBFD on a series that generates decent series revenue can be quite lucrative.
These newsletters were all revenue-positive, so I’d repeat all of them, but as you can see, the BookBub feature does a lot more for my bottom line. When people ask me whether a BookBub feature is worth the money, I always tell them it depends on the marketability of their book. But if your book is marketable, the Featured Deal will likely be profitable too.
And, of course, none of these metrics include the value of finding new readers who will then go through to read other series from your backlist.
Chirp audiobook deals
If you discount your audio distributed through Findaway Voices (now Voices by INAudio) or one of the other audiobook distributors, you can apply for a feature in Chirp’s newsletter blasts and placement on their website and app. Readers also feel compelled to “buy soon” because it’s a limited-time price drop. Chirp now offers a promotion called a Freebie Friday, a free promotion that can get more ears on your first-in-series title as well as any other audiobooks you’ve discounted.
In the same way that a BookBub Featured Deal generates sales for later ebooks in a series, the first free or discounted Chirp title drives new listeners into your catalog, and you can calculate how much you make from there by following the same process as before.
I always discount the other titles in my series for Chirp deals — that’s where I make the majority of my money, and for a Freebie Friday deal, it’s where I make ALL of the money. For what it’s worth, I have extensively tested “reverse waterfall” pricing (i.e., 99c, $1.99, $2.99, $3.99) versus simply pricing all the next books at the same discounted price (e.g. $4.99), and the flat but lowered pricing has won every single time for overall revenue. You should absolutely test this for yourself, but I find that the additional revenue from a $4.99 sale offsets the slightly lower sell-through in terms of the bottom line.
If you want to grow your listener pool (aka bring in more readers, but you are less worried about total revenue from one “deal”), and if you have another tightly focused and branded book series for new listeners to move toward, a reverse waterfall might work better for you. My books are all over the place because I stink at branding, so I focus on driving money from each deal on its own.
(NOTE: I have noticed increased sales on other audio platforms after a successful Chirp deal. I believe the average Chirp consumer does listen on Chirp, but often also consumes audiobooks on at least one other platform. That’s something to keep in mind when you consider your revenue from a Chirp deal — it’s likely not going to be limited only to Chirp.)
Facebook, BookBub, and Amazon ads
My next-in-line option for generating downloads of a free book is to run cost-per-click ads. Facebook ads have worked the best for me historically, though they’re a little complicated to set up. Make sure you prominently include FREE EBOOK or FREE AUDIOBOOK in the headline and image, and watch how many downloads you get on your targeted platform closely. I turn off my ads when I’m spending anywhere close to my average revenue per free download. I have to check these ads and their performance daily, because Facebook ad results can decline quickly and without warning.
BookBub Ads can be tricky (in my opinion) because they require a lot of testing to get right. But the great thing about BookBub Ads is that you can easily target only readers from a given platform if your free book performs better there (like Nook for my women’s fiction, for instance, or Apple for my fantasy titles). It’s very, VERY difficult to do that kind of granular targeting on Facebook, especially with their recent removal of detailed targeting options.
Author-created free book promos
The general idea of author-organized free book promos is that authors can pool the benefit of their combined newsletters and share readers who are already willing to read and support indies. They usually cost almost nothing, so any read-through you gain is all profit. The most famous of these is the ZoeBub, which you can join by invitation only — but others, like the Romance Book Blast, are run through Facebook groups that are easy to find, join, and work with.
If you’re starting one yourself, these promos can be quite a lot of work to set up. You have to pick your angle (fantasy free book blast, mystery authors book blast, etc.), and then you need to pick a date, set up a website you will send readers to, gather authors who will be a good fit, and work out the distribution model. Will you send readers to a landing page linking to free books on retailer platforms? Or will you run all the free book giveaways through your direct store or through BookFunnel? Each approach has pros and cons you will have to navigate.
I find that my read-through from these isn’t quite as good as when the downloads come from a newsletter send or a paid ad, and participating can water down my revenue per free download. I believe this is largely because readers on big promo days often download so many free books that they are even less likely than normal to ever get around to reading mine. Each author will have to decide for themselves whether they’re willing to do them, since they cost nothing but time, but they consequently tend to yield lower-than-usual results.
Platform-specific promos
Lastly, many retailers offer promotional opportunities you can plan around a BookBub feature, for instance. You can apply for them at Kobo, though many of the options, like their free lists, have a fee. (Those fees go to offset the time and work required by their staff to run them, so at least you know they’re going someplace good.) You can also apply for Price Promos at Nook that are free to secure, though sometimes harder to get. These are a great way to find new readers for your freebie at the non-Amazon retailers without spending a lot.
I hope you’ll try some of these strategies to find out how free book promotions can best work for your titles and brand. And if you get just one thing from this article, I hope it’s this: The next time you hear people asking whether free works, you’ll know that the answer is YES. Good luck finding the best way to get your unique story into readers’ hands and turning them into your new super fans.
