R. J. Keller, author, on her experience with offering books for free
By Paul Biba
In an interesting post over at Publishing Renaissance, author R. J. Keller talks about her experience with offering her books for free, and how Read an eBook Week worked out for her. She is very positive, but she is going to things a bit differently next time. Thanks to Finding Free Ebooks for the link.
* It has been available at Smashwords, sponsor of “Read an E-book Week”, for several months at “set your own price,” so it was automatically placed on their special week-long promotion page. During the week, 58 copies of WFS were downloaded or purchased there. Some paid for the privelege, but most didn’t.
* WFS is also featured on several free e-book websites (see this post to get a list of links). Through my sitemeter, I can directly link 319 downloads last week alone to those sites.
* Back in February, a woman from Massachussetts downloaded WFS for free. She liked it enough to post a link to it on a thread at the Kindle message board the evening before “Read an E-book Week” kicked off. This resulted in 47 free downloads in the next three hours. The next day, a different Kindle board member posted a link to the Kindle version. By the end of the day I’d sold 27 copies. By then I had tracked down the original post (again, through my trusty sitemeter) and posted a “thanks for the shout out!”-esque message of my own. Result: another 15 copies sold in less than half an hour. My total Kindle sales for the week: 93. I have no doubt that most, if not all, of those were a direct result of that one original free reader’s post. Even better, many of those new (paying) readers posted their own positive reviews on the board. Two of them posted reviews at Goodreads.
* Twenty-three new readers emailed me directly, asking when my next book is coming out. I’m going to say that again. Twenty-three new readers emailed me directly, asking when my next book is coming out.
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