Giving away free book downloads seems to be a good way to let readers know about your writing style, especially if you have several books published. So, how do you go about it?
The most obvious way is to join Amazon select, by doing this you will be able to offer your book free for any five days in a 3 month period. However, this has its drawbacks, to be in Amazon select you have to make your ebook exclusive to Amazon, which means that you can't sell that book through Smashwords or D2D.
The other issue is that many books on Amazon seem to be permanently free. Because I'm a bit of a miser, when I'm looking for a new book I can't help but search through the free book offers on Amazon. Some are good and some are bad, but there are literally hundreds of them. After doing this several times over a period of months I noticed that the same books were always free, so how does that work if I only get five days through Amazon select?
I sent an e-mail and asked Amazon if I could make one of my books permanently free and they said no. So how do Authors manage to get their books on the permanently free list? Well if you have a book that is distributed through Smashwords or D2D here is how it is done in four easy steps.
Step one
Go to Smashwords and or D2D and change the price of your book to free.
Step two
Over the next few days keep checking one of the channels, ie Barnes and Noble, to see if they have made your book free. When they have, copy the URL.
Step Three
Go to your book on Amazon and in the details you will find a link that says "report a lower price" Click on this link and a dialect box will open asking for the URL of the website where you found it cheaper. Paste the URL you copied into the box and then answer the other couple of other simple questions they ask.
Step Four
Ask some of your friends to do the above just to nudge Amazon in the right direction.
Well that's the theory. My book, "Bossyboots" went free on Barnes and Noble last week and I reported it to Amazon so that they could price match it. So far it hasn't cahnged, but I gather that the process is a bit hit and miss.
If you would like to report a cheaper price for my book, here is the link and, if you've got a Nook reader, why not pick up a free copy for yourself while you are there.
