Many authors are adopting the marketing strategy of setting their Kindle book price to free on Amazon in hopes that they can increase their fan base and ultimately their book sales as well. But how well does this strategy work? And what are the benefits and drawbacks for authors?
It turns out that there are at least six considerable benefits or reasons to price your book at free. And running a free book promotion has plenty of upside and very little downside, if you can handle giving your book away for free to strangers. The six benefits are: increased book sales, more book reviews, more Amazon followers, more Kindle Unlimited page reads, increased fan base, and more audio book sales.
The drawback, of course, is that you miss out on revenue. You get no royalty payment each time your book is download for free.
When you take the long view, your setting your book price to free, even for a few days, will increase your fan base and eventually drive your sales of your other books.
To price your book at free on Amazon you have two options. You can mark it down to $0.00 for up to 5 days each quarter on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform. Or you can price your book for free on another platform, such as Apple books, and wait for Amazon to price match your book which they do according to their KDP pricing policy.
Once your book is priced at free, you will want to spread the word by running book promotions, including the book in your newsletter and posting on social media. You will be able to see how many books you have given away on Kindle by logging into your KDP dashboard and looking at your reports.
Here’s one interesting fact, for every 1000 people who download your free book, on average 2-3 of them will write a book review and post it on Amazon.
