Offering your book for free is a great way to hook readers into a series, grow your mailing list, and reach readers who wouldn’t take a chance on you at full price. But a free price tag doesn’t do much on its own — you still have to get the book in front of readers. There are so many ways to promote books, but if you’re making a book permafree or scheduling a limited-time free discount, here are three easy places to start.
Step 1: Submit to free and paid promotions
Apply for a paid feature
For the fastest and highest-yield boost, submit your book for a BookBub promotion. It takes no more effort than filling out a submission form, and gives your book the chance to reach the most engaged and relevant audiences of BookBub’s millions of readers. And it’s a great tool for free book promotion — our partners often see stronger engagement with free deals, which get about 10x the response rate of non-free titles.
There are a few different newsletters available to you at BookBub for free price promotions:
- Featured Deals: A daily email featuring discounted ebooks curated by our editors, who match your book to readers by category.
- Free Reads: When you submit for a free Featured Deal, you have the option to also be considered for Free Reads, an email that targets a highly engaged subset of BookBub power readers specifically looking for new authors and series.
- Freebie Friday: A weekly Chirp email that, like Free Reads, offers a fresh alternative to Chirp Featured Deals for authors and publishers who want to expand the reach of their free discounts on audiobooks.
Romance author Bridget E. Baker prioritizes paid newsletters as her most effective strategy for promoting free ebooks and audiobooks. One of her BookBub Featured Deals generated 9,533 downloads on Amazon in a single day for $665 — a cost of 7 cents per download and an estimated $4,000 in profit.
My top pick for any free promotion, and the industry-wide gold standard, is a BookBub Featured Deal. 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.
—Bridget E. Baker, author of Displaced
When Stephanie Woodman ran a Free Reads promotion for her debut book, Eye Contact Over Truk, it received almost 10,000 downloads within nine days, as well as more reviews and new followers.
This was a wonderful opportunity to reach new readers. As a new author, I view this as a very successful first step on the promotion path to both this book, as well as my next book.
—Stephanie Woodman, author of Eye Contact Over Truk
Cross-promote with other authors
Beyond BookBub, a great free way to boost your reach is to gain access to other authors’ audiences. Joining a book blast or group promo puts your free book in front of readers who already follow authors in your genre, often for little more than the time it takes to coordinate. You can find these opportunities on social media — check author groups and forums — or on promo platforms like BookSweeps and StoryOrigin.
Jacqueline Diamond participates in coordinated multi-author giveaway days, which she says “is a great way to encourage thousands of downloads with minimal effort and expense.”
Nonfiction authors can do a version of this too — for example, team up with a few authors or experts in adjacent categories to cross-promote a “free resource” bundle, like this group did for one of Ella Barnard’s Author Like a Boss events.
Step 2: Update your author platform
While you’re waiting to hear back on promo submissions, use the time to review your branding and author platform. Before your discount, prepare for the influx of new readers by updating your ebook’s back matter with links to books you want readers to buy next. While your book is free, put it front and center anywhere readers are already visiting your online spaces or finishing your books: your website and newsletter, your social bios or cover photos, and your back matter.
Update your website
Since your author website is often the first place a new reader goes to learn more about you, make sure your free offer is impossible to miss! There are many ways to get creative with displaying a free book on your website — here are a few examples of how authors have featured them prominently on their homepage, in their site navigation, and in a popup that catches visitors before they leave:
Add a link to your profiles
Make a quick update to your bios or author profiles to spotlight the free offer. Katie Chance keeps her Linktree updated with limited-time free deals.
Paul J Bennett’s TikTok profile prominently features a “free books” link to a landing page with a clear call to action.
Update your back matter
Promoting a free book in your back matter is a great way to drive new readers to your newsletter and keep them in your world. Remember it works both ways: Also update the back matter of the free book to point readers to your other books or a review request, so you’re maximizing what you get from every download!
Meghan O’Flynn uses her back matter to guide readers through her catalog with two “next read” recommendations per book: typically the series sequel plus a standalone or alternate series pick.
Giving away free books doesn’t work if readers aren’t excited enough to plunk down money for the second in series. I have a spreadsheet where I keep track of which books I’ve linked in each novel… If any reader takes every one of my back matter recommendations, they’ll have read my entire backlist.
—Meghan O’Flynn, author of Repressed
BA Gillies offers his free novella at the back of every book, and also adds the first 10% of the next book to the end of every novel — a strategy he said has “a surprisingly large impact” on converting readers.
This single call-to-action converts readers steadily. By the time someone finishes book one, they want to read more. Offering a substantial novella rather than a short sample makes the sign-up feel generous rather than transactional.
—BA Gillies, author of Return to the Galaxy
Step 3: Drive additional traffic with ads and social
If you’ve submitted for a promotion, updated your platform, and have more time or budget to spare, these two tactics tend to have the most potential for additional lift from free books:
Run display ads
Ads are one of the most reliable ways to keep new readers finding your free book, and you don’t need a big budget or design skills to create effective campaigns. Keep the design simple: Lead with your cover, an intriguing line of copy, and the promo price in large, unmissable text. The BookBub Ads creative builder has a template built for exactly this!
When Kika Emers ran campaigns to promote her limited-time discount, she leaned into the deal and created an ad using the BookBub creative template that focused on the free price point.
It was very quick to put together the ad image as opposed to hours spent on a Canva design.
—Kika Emers, author of Remember Pompeii
Cindy Kirk, who also uses BookBub Ads to run short-term price promotions, agrees that the ad images that get the most clicks are often the simplest.
I’ve learned that for my promos, the book cover in a simple, easy-to-read ad with an intriguing quote or message, and the promo price in large letters works best for a high click-through rate.
—Cindy Kirk, USA Today bestselling author of Christmas in Good Hope
Ads also let you keep the momentum going with little ongoing effort. Patricia McLinn runs continuous BookBub Ads on her permafree first-in-series to keep a steady stream of new readers entering the series.
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.
—Patricia McLinn, USA Today bestselling author of Sign Off
Run organic social campaigns
Organic social is a free way to remind your existing followers that your book is discounted. Try treating the promotion like its own mini campaign, focusing on keeping the offer top of mind with content like pinned posts or countdown posts that build urgency toward the deal’s last day.
Luke McNamara posts on Instagram each day that a limited-time giveaway is live, with countdown messages like “FIVE days left” and “Last day to enter!” When he ran a BookBub Featured Deal on his debut book, he raised awareness on social media with “a giveaway for one signed paperback copy of my book on Instagram, launching it five days before my BookBub promo went live and scheduling it to end when the promo launched.”
If you can, leverage your followers’ audiences, too: Reach out to your most loyal fans or build a street team of readers who help spread the word every time you have a free promotion.
Melissa Dymond activates her street team around price promotions like BookBub Featured Deals, asking them to spread the word by posting their own content or engaging with hers.
When the team rallies around a post, I’ve seen my content receive two to five times more views than similar posts I publish without that extra support.
—Melissa Dymond, author of Holiday Star
How each step builds on the next
Submitting for a promotion is the fastest way to get lots of new eyes on your free book, and the next two steps can help compound your results. Your author platform and back matter add extra visibility on top of the promotion, while also making sure readers who find the free book actually read through. Meanwhile, ads and social media are available to you during and after the promotion when you have a little extra time or budget. Next time your book is free, try running through all three steps and see how much further your reach goes!
