The Free Ebook Experiment — Part 1

The 5‑star nov­el, avail­able on Ama­zon.

Accord­ing to the new, social-net­work­ing phi­los­o­phy of book pro­mo­tion, one of the most effec­tive ways of build­ing your audi­ence is to give away copies of your book.

Of course the old-school part of me—the part of me that has been paid for my writ­ing ever since I was a cub reporter—bristles at this. I don’t want to give my work away; I want read­ers to buy it.

My Kin­dle mys­tery nov­el, A Real Piece of Work, has been avail­able on Ama­zon since late Novem­ber 2011. That’s over two months. But in that peri­od of time I’ve man­aged to sell few­er than 200 copies of the nov­el. For those eager read­ers wait­ing for me to sell 1,000 copies and release book #2 in the series, this news must come as a dis­ap­point­ment. There’s still a long way to go.

This is where the give­away comes in.

On Wednes­day and Thurs­day, Feb­ru­ary 8 & 9, 2012, A Real Piece of Work will be avail­able on Ama­zon as a FREE  Kin­dle ebook down­load.

Many suc­cess­ful indie pub­lish­ers on the Kin­dle plat­form report that offer­ing your book for free for 1–2 days boosts its rank­ing and vis­i­bil­i­ty, so that when the free pro­mo­tion is over, the resid­ual buzz dri­ves sales. That’s what I’m hop­ing for.

If you’re a bar­gain-hunter and you hap­pen to pick up A Real Piece of Work for free, I hope if you enjoy it you’ll do me the favor of a pos­i­tive review on Ama­zon and Goodreads. And please tell every­one you know about the novel—everyone with a Kin­dle, iPad or oth­er Kin­dle read­er-com­pat­i­ble device (there are many), as well as every­one you know who enjoys mys­ter­ies and exquis­ite­ly well-writ­ten books. Help get the word out. Please.

The soon­er the word gets out and I sell 1,000 copies of A Real Piece of Work, the soon­er I’ll release book #2 in the series. The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent is already com­plete, and if you’d like to learn more about it, check out the Dako­ta Stevens web­site.

Please note, if you’re a fel­low writer who hoped this would be a step-by-step how-to arti­cle about using your “free days” on KDP Select, let me direct you to an excel­lent blog entry that I’m using as my script for this exper­i­ment. It’s titled “Max­i­miz­ing Free Days on Kin­dle Select,” and the author is a woman named Karen Baney. She details the tac­tics she used, and since she had pos­i­tive results, I decid­ed to use her method­ol­o­gy as the mod­el for my own free pro­mo­tion.

I’ve already decid­ed that this exper­i­ment will be the Lit­mus test for whether I con­tin­ue with Ama­zon’s KDP Select. Unless my “free days” trans­late to rad­i­cal­ly improved sales, I plan on expand­ing pub­li­ca­tion of A Real Piece of Work onto oth­er plat­forms includ­ing Google Ebooks, iTunes and pos­si­bly Smash­words. We’ll see.

In Part 2 of this piece, I will post the results of this free pro­mo­tion exper­i­ment: how many free down­loads there were and how many sales there were in the week fol­low­ing. Fin­gers crossed for 800+ copies sold.

By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

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