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Does Amazon promote free ebooks?

Oven

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I'm writing an ebook right now and my only goal with it is to get it into as many hands as possible. I don't care how it's priced.

I know that if I'm selling a book Amazon has the kdp select program which I can enroll in and they will promote the book for me but do they do this for free ebooks? If not does it make more sense for me to put a very small price tag on the book and sell it just so I can get into the kdp program or should I just make it free and hope people find it somehow through Amazon?

Also I actually want people to read it so if I make it free I think people will be less likely to read it and more likely to download it but never open it. Am I going to get so many more downloads that it makes it worth it to be free even if a smaller % actually read it?
 
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Thriftypreneur

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The KDP select program is fairly useless unless you're using it to promote a series of books. Example: Making book #1 in your series free for the sole purpose of generating sales to books #2 and #3 in your series.

After a book comes off of free promotion through KDP select, any sales rank it may have had is wiped out. So, putting a book for free in hopes of gaining ranking and visibility for said book is futile. I personally recommend just avoiding KDP select all together as their 'perks' don't outweigh the 90 day exclusivity. If you look to go the free option with a book, better is to go through the process of making it a perma-free title on Amazon by publishing it for free at other vendors and having Amazon price match the listing.
 

Oven

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The KDP select program is fairly useless unless you're using it to promote a series of books. Example: Making book #1 in your series free for the sole purpose of generating sales to books #2 and #3 in your series.
After a book comes off of free promotion through KDP select, any sales rank it may have had is wiped out. So, putting a book for free in hopes of gaining ranking and visibility for said book is futile. I personally recommend just avoiding KDP select all together as their 'perks' don't outweigh the 90 day exclusivity. If you look to go the free option with a book, better is to go through the process of making it a perma-free title on Amazon by publishing it for free at other vendors and having Amazon price match the listing.
I'm not planning on using the book to promote a series or any other book. I just want the book to get as many downloads as possible. I know that if I put it in the KDP select program Amazon will promote it for me and I'll get xxx amount of downloads in the first week and then it will stop. My fear for making it a perma-free title on Amazon and publishing it free at other vendors is that no one will be able to find it? I'd rather get xxx downloads in the first week compared to never getting xxx downloads in the books lifetime. Do you think people will still find it if I make it free and will it be as much as would have downloaded it during it's week in the kdp select program?
 

Thriftypreneur

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I'm not planning on using the book to promote a series or any other book. I just want the book to get as many downloads as possible. I know that if I put it in the KDP select program Amazon will promote it for me and I'll get xxx amount of downloads in the first week and then it will stop. My fear for making it a perma-free title on Amazon and publishing it free at other vendors is that no one will be able to find it? I'd rather get xxx downloads in the first week compared to never getting xxx downloads in the books lifetime. Do you think people will still find it if I make it free and will it be as much as would have downloaded it during it's week in the kdp select program?

If the novel is standalone and not meant to promote other titles, then setting it to perma-free doesn't really make any sense. So KDP Select promotion becomes the only option that makes sense to give out free copies of your book.

What I was trying to get at with KDP Select free promotion were these points:

1. Download numbers utilizing only the free promotional days (with no outside promotion to promote your free days) can vary wildly. I've seen people report anywhere from 300 downloads over the 5 days to 5000. It depends on too many factors to measure (genre, cover, book quality, blurb, sample quality, etc, etc, etc).

2. Free downloads won't affect your ranking in the paid store. If you were ranked 500,000 before the promotion, you'll still be 500,000+ or worse paid ranking after the promotion. Only way I see to increase paid ranking via KDP Select free promotion is if your book does some good numbers and starts spreading via word of mouth, or you get really lucky with your "also bought" lists.

3. You're unlikely to get a ton (if any) reviews from your promotion. Reviews are hard to come by. 500 free downloads usually won't get you any reviews. Like most things, it's a numbers game here too. Additionally, free books tend to get worse reviews than paid books. Maybe it's the psychological perceived value thing, but it's been my experience and observation that it's much more difficult to get good reviews from free books than it is paid books.

For example, let's say you have a book and it gets 10,000 sales at .99c, then, you go back in time and list the same fresh, new book for perma-free and get 10,000 downloads. It's a very safe assumption that the 10,000 sales will result in a better overall review score (and more reviews overall) than the free downloads, even though it was the exact same book. For whatever reason, people seem to be much more critical of free books and are less likely to review them at all.

The best way to utilize the free promotional days from KDP Select is to organize and promote those free days through 3rd party websites/mailing lists/etc. Orchestrating a marketing blast for your free promotion is how most people are able to hit the 5 figure downloads and use the residual promotion to have it impact their paid ranking.

But, even better than that, is utilizing the free downloads to achieve something else -- whether that is sell-through's to additional books in your catalog, generating subscribers to your email list, or any other way you can get *something* in return for giving all those books away.

In the end, I guess that's just a really long way of saying that giving books away just to give them away (particularly with only 1 title in your catalog) isn't really going to do anything for you. Well, not unless you do some really big numbers (which KDP Select promotion is unlikely to do without adding outside promotion as well).

Also I actually want people to read it so if I make it free I think people will be less likely to read it and more likely to download it but never open it. Am I going to get so many more downloads that it makes it worth it to be free even if a smaller % actually read it?

Oh, and as for this, it's pretty much impossible to measure how many people actually read your book, especially if you have nothing else for readers to do that you can get some numbers from (like subscribe to an email list from your book, or move on to the next book in a series, or whatever).

I only know people are reading my perma-free because of being able to measure how many sales I get to subsequent titles in the series. The conversion rate of downloads to email subscribes and/or reviews is too low to get an accurate representation.
 
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