Although it might seem counterintuitive, making one of your books permanently free can be a savvy marketing move. If you’ve written a series or a large backlist of books and you publish your books wide, a permafree book is a great way to entice new readers, increase your exposure, and drive sales for your other books. Here, we’ll discuss how to make your ebooks permafree and how to use them to achieve your marketing goals.
If you already have a permafree book and just want to know how to promote it, jump to the next section!
How to make your ebook permafree
Most major retailers — Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play — allow you to set your book to free in your account on each site. Alternatively, you can set your book to free on retailers via a book distribution service like Draft2Digital or PublishDrive. After uploading your book to a distributor, set your list price to $0.00 and they’ll update the price at your retailers.
Some retailers, like Amazon, don’t allow you to permanently set your book’s price to $0.00. If your book is enrolled in KDP Select, you can offer your book for free for up to five days in every 90-day enrollment period, but you’ll need to wait until your enrollment period ends if you want to make your book free for an extended period of time — then, you need to rely on price matching.
It can take some time to go into effect, but Amazon will generally price match to free if your book is already free on all other sites where you sell books. Once your book is available for free at other retailers, Amazon may detect the change and price match automatically. To make sure they will price match, you can also alert them about the lower price by submitting the price match form in the Help section of your KDP dashboard.
In the dashboard, select Help and Contact Us. Under the Pricing category, select Price Matching, then I Still Need Help and Send Us an Email.
For the fastest response, fill in the email template provided to send the information Amazon needs in the correct format. The line at the top of the email should be “Select type of request: [Add Price Match]”.
Make sure you include links to all the retailers in all regions where your book is free — Amazon will only price match in the regions you request. You can find out how to get links to your book on international retailers here. (This is also a great way to double-check your book is free in all markets before you submit the request.)
Your email should look like the following — this example email requests price matching in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, but you can continue for as many regions as you need (you can find a full list of country-specific codes here):
Select type of request: [Add Price Match]
1. [ASIN] / Kindle Store: .COM / [link(s) to US stores where your book is free] / 0.00
2. [ASIN] / Kindle Store: UK / [link(s) to UK stores where your book is free] / 0.00
3. [ASIN] / Kindle Store: CA / [link(s) to Canada stores where your book is free] / 0.00
4. [ASIN] / Kindle Store: AU / [link(s) to Australia stores where your book is free] / 0.00
Tip: Save your email in a document so you can easily copy and paste and swap out the links each time you need to request a price match for another book. Keep these documents in a dedicated file to keep track of all your permafree promotions.
It can take up to a few days for the price match to go into effect, so if you’re running a BookBub Featured Deal, be sure to submit the request well in advance of your promotion date. Check that Amazon price matched in every region you requested, and you’re good to go! When you’re ready to put your price back up, repeat the steps above, changing “Select type of request:” at the top of your email to “Remove Price Match.”
How to use permafree books in your marketing
Your permafree marketing strategy depends on what you want to achieve and the stage of your publishing journey. For example, for debut authors who want to run a permafree promotion, it makes sense to focus on growing an audience or gaining reviews. Authors who have a series or multiple books in their backlist can additionally use a permafree book to drive sales and exposure for their other books.
Let’s dive into the promotional tools and tactics you can use for each of these strategies:
1. Grow your audience
Making one of your books permafree can be an excellent way to attract new readers. You can use it as a reader magnet to build your mailing list or following — for example, by:
- Joining group promotions or newsletter swaps on sites like BookFunnel or StoryOrigin
- Running contests to win your free book via your website or services like BookSweeps or LitRing
- Promoting your free book on your newsletter sign-up page or pop-up on your website
- Using the back matter of your permafree to prompt readers to follow you on BookBub or social media, or to sign up for your newsletter
- “Taking over” the Facebook group of an author in your genre to promote your permafree
- Using your BookBub Author Profile to highlight your permafree book
Author Juno Rushdan promotes her free book in the very first line of her BookBub Author Profile to encourage readers to join her newsletter:
At the back of the book, she includes links to follow her on BookBub — for anyone who hasn’t already! — and connect with her on social media.
2. Gain reviews
Offering a book for free is a great way to get your book in the hands of a large number of readers — and more readers means more potential reviewers!
Asking for reviews in the back matter of a free book can be an effective strategy for any author to boost reviews, even if you don’t yet have an established street team or large following. Bestselling fantasy and sci-fi author Daniel Arenson includes at least three calls to action in the back matter of his novels: a link to the sequel, a link to join his mailing list, and a request for reviews.
Once you’ve built your email list, try offering Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) to subscribers for early reviews. You can also pay for a service like NetGalley, Booksprout, or Edelweiss to send out your ARCs. When your book is published, you can leverage the power of a BookBub Featured Deal to gain more reviews — permafree books are eligible for submission! Author Ada Bell gained hundreds of reviews after running a deal on her free first-in-series:
The sales are great. The income is useful. But it’s more than that. It’s seeing that Mystic Pieces now has over 1,000 ratings and reviews, mostly positive. It’s seeing over 100 reviews for [later-series books] The Scry’s the Limit and Sight Seering, which had only a handful before.
3. Increase your exposure
Any price promotion will give you more visibility, but Featured Deals for free books on BookBub get 10 times the response rate of discounted ones. The free titles we feature can get up to tens of thousands of downloads, which means your book will be in the hands of thousands of readers you might not otherwise have reached. And even multiple Featured Deals for a permafree book can continue to capture new readers! All those downloads can drive your book up retailers’ free bestseller lists, and your new readers will spread the word about your book, too. Sixty-five percent of our surveyed readers tell their friends about books they’ve discovered via a price promotion.
In addition to Featured Deals, BookBub Ads can also help you boost exposure for free books. Our ads platform lets you continue promoting the book for as long as it’s permafree (rather than just on the day of the feature). After running a BookBub Featured Deal for his permafree first-in-series, Suitcase Girl, Ty Hutchinson used BookBub Ads to keep the momentum going with the goal of driving a high volume of downloads at the lowest possible CPC. Ty’s campaign propped up the downloads that started with his Featured Deal, generating over 22,000 clicks throughout his five-month advertising period.
4. Drive more sales of other books
BookBub readers don’t just download free books idly — 60 percent of surveyed readers say they always read the discounted books they’ve discovered. This exposure can have a huge impact on the sales of your other books. More than 60 percent of surveyed readers said after downloading an author’s book for free, they later purchased another book by that author. This is especially true if the free book is part of a series: More than 75 percent of our authors reported higher sales of their other books after a free BookBub promotion, with an average gain in sales of over 100 percent, but that increase is up to five times higher when the free book is part of a series.
Here’s where back matter comes in once again — as well as using the back matter of a free book to grow your newsletter, you can use it to encourage sell-through. When author Jane Steen ran a feature on a permafree book with optimized back matter, her sales of later-series books were nearly double in the month following the feature compared to the month before.
I make sure that immediately after the book ends, on the next page there is a promo for the one after. I also have ‘Books by Jane Steen’ included wherever I can so that readers are aware the books are part of a series. I figure that if readers love the books they will look for more.
BookBub Ads is another effective tool for increasing follow-on sales. Because you can run ads on an ongoing basis, you can introduce a consistent stream of new readers to book 1 and drive sales for the whole series. Author Patricia McLinn increased her overall income by nearly nine percent from running continuous campaigns for her free first book. She said:
My ongoing BookBub Ads are predominately for free first-in-series books, emphasizing my longer series so the cost of advertising is spread across more books and my ads more easily reach a positive ROI.
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