By Vincent B. Davis II @vbdavisii

How does this sound to you: after you’ve spent thousands of hours researching, writing, and editing your book, you give it away… for free. Sounds awful right? What if I said that you need to pay for it?

There aren’t many topics in the world of writing and publishing more controversial than this: the idea of giving away your books for free. The ability to get our books into the hands of a thousand readers sounds amazing, but it is unacceptable to not receive compensation for our work. Somehow it feels as if it devalues the work.

Although I am not in a position to debate the finer points of free promotions, opting for Kindle Select’s free day promotions have become a marketing technique that modern publishers and writers cannot afford to ignore. I decided to add this to my arsenal.

Unfortunately, free promotions are as misunderstood as they are offensive, so as someone who has recently just finished my 5 free promotion days, I’d like to explain a few things.

Things you should expect

• To spend some money– you aren’t required to spend anything. The promotion itself is actually free, but people aren’t going to stumble on your book simply because it’s free. I paid out $315 over the course of the 5 days, for book promotion websites to push my book to hundreds of thousands of email subscribers, Twitter followers, and Facebook fans.
• To move a lot of copies– over the course of the 5 days, I moved roughly 6,600 copies. Being a brand new author, with virtually no name recognition, this was very exciting. If only a handful of those 6,600 become fans of mine and continue to read the series, the investment will pay for itself.
• To make your money back– my promotion ran from July 10^th-July 14^th (Amazon Prime day was the 11^th, and there is a case to be made for this either hurting or helping my sales). The five days leading the up to the 10^th, I was averaging about 5 E-book sales a day, and was averaging about 420 pages read in Kindle Unlimited (works out to about $2 a day, as Amazon pays authors roughly half a cent per page read). During the promotion, I obviously had no paid sales, but averaged about 880 pages read a day. This is a lot more individuals reading my book, but monetarily, I am still way in the red. However, in the four days since the promotion ended, I am averaging 1,650 pages read, and 14.5 paid E-book sales a day. That is a big increase, and those numbers have grown every day since the 14^th. It shouldn’t take much longer for the promotion to pay for itself.
• Your ‘also-bought”s to be devalued– This seems obvious, but it never really occurred to me before hand. Before the free promotion, the books that came up under my book as “people who bought this also bought” were all books about Ancient Rome. It really excited me to see my book listed with some of the books I read growing up. However, after the campaign, the “also bought”s now feature many low-quality books that were also promoted through the services I used. This is a marginal detractor but still needed to be mentioned.

Things you shouldn’t expect

• To get a lot of reviews– I was torn whether or not to add this. In the 8 days since I began my campaign, I have received three 5 star reviews from unsolicited readers who found my book through my free campaign. I was very pleased with this. But given that the book was bought by nearly 7,000 people, it’s not a great percentage.
• To sell other versions of your book– people who subscribe to free E-book mailing want to receive (big surprise) free books. My paperback sales were not really affected by this promotion, even with thousands of people visiting my page.

Rookie Mistakes

• Staggering my promotions– I am really still kicking myself over this one. When planning and organizing my campaign, I spread out the different promotional venues throughout all five days. Man, was this a mistake. The real benefit of doing these promotions is that you can make it to the Top 100 books in the Kindle Store, where thousands of hungry readers peruse the lists to find their next story. I made it into the top 50 in my first two days, in the entire Kindle Store, and maintained the rank of #1 in Historical Thrillers, and #2 in all of Historical Fiction! But I slowly began to descend the ranks after that. Unfortunately, I staggered my promotions, so all of them did not trigger that first day. Sure, the way I did it ensured that I had a steady flow of downloads over the full 5 days, but if I had used them all on the first days, I feel certain that I could have pushed into the top 20, perhaps even top 10, of the Kindle Store. If I had been, I cannot imagine how many more downloads I would have had. I am haunted by the downloads I left on the table. But overall, I am very satisfied with free book campaign!

Vincent B. Davis II is an entrepreneur, soldier, and freelance writer. In December 2016, he founded Thirteenth Press, LLC. His first novel, “The Man with Two Names” is available on Amazon now. You can connect with him on Facebook, Twitter, or on his website at vincentbdavisii.com. He loves hearing from other authors! If you would like to be featured on Blueridgeconference.com, e-mail him at vincent@thirteenthpress.com with the subject line “Blog Query”.