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Free ebooks as a promotional tool: it works
August 10, 2009 | 8:45 am
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By Paul Biba
Free ebooks as a promotional tool seem to be working. At least that’s the thesis of this article on CBS11TV. Thanks to Christine of Finding Free Ebooks for the link.
… In recent days, the top three Kindle sellers have been free books: Patterson’s, Joseph Finder’s “Paranoia” and Keyes’ “The Briar King.”
“There’s always going to be someone who wants free things. What we’re trying to do is link free with paid,” Maja Thomas, senior vice president of digital media at Patterson’s publisher, the Hachette Book Group, said. “It’s like priming the pump.”
“What we like to do is make the first book in a series free, usually a series that has multiple books,” said Scott Shannon, publisher of the Del Rey/Spectra imprint at Random House, Inc., which published Keyes’ fantasy novel.
Shannon said Del Rey has had especially good luck with Naomi Novik’s “Temeraire” fantasy series after offering the first book for free. He said sales for the other Temeraire novels increased by more than 1,000 percent. “It’s been stunning,” he said. …
“It’s a huge hot-button topic we’ve been discussing within our division and at the corporate level,” Shannon said. “We have had phenomenal success with using free books to get people to buy others by an author. But in the long term, we have to guard the market. We have to make sure people understand that time and energy goes into writing a book.”
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Comments:
Well well, they finally discover that Baen’s approach works. Who knows, maybe it will dawn on them that ditching DRM and decreasing prices will increase sales even more.
Whoops, I meant to cover this article myself but never got around to it.
Some folks over on Baen’s Bar have been snarking that, though Baen has been doing the give-e-books-away-free thing for ten years, it doesn’t rate a single mention in that article.
Making the first book of a multi-book series free is a lot like free excerpts of books, to the next degree. I’m not at all surprised it helps sell books, though it’s of dubious help to someone who only writes one, or a few unrelated books.