Can free books really lead to book sales? Here's how I did it.

Here’s how free book promotions can lead to sales and a bump in Amazon rank.

My most popular book is in KU and I’ve been doing regular free promotions and I’m trying to analyze how it’s working. Here’s what I’ve done.

Here are the basic steps:

Set book to free for a certain day in the future (ideally more than two weeks if you’re going to be using some of the promotional partners).
Sign up for the free promotional sites (e.g. FreeBooksy, The Fussy Librarian, etc.). There are SO many, it’s hard to choose. Make sure you get your days right and in advance!
On the free day, watch your (free) rank climb. Share this rank on social media.
After the free day, if you get some follow-up sales, screenshot where you are in the paid rankings and share.
Repeat, learn, improve.

I’ve been having some fun with step #4 where I’ll screenshot where I am in the paid rankings and then share that on social and tag the others I’m near in the rankings. I’ve been writing something humble and/or flattering about how I’m thrilled to be with that group of people etc.

Free books downloaded during the free day and promotion.

632 books downloaded for free on the day of the promotion. Great. I’ve had better (actually, much better: one day I had 2,917 books downloaded), but hey, it’s still 632 people downloading my book.

But what’s interesting is what happened the next day.

Post-free-day book sales. See how they’re better than pre-free-day?

Now of course, it could very well be that they just read their email from the promotional partner (e.g. the FreeBooksy companies) and they missed the freebie and bought it. In fact, that’s likely what happened.

But is that bad? I don’t know. It’s sales. They didn’t have to buy the book. Maybe they thought it was free, checked out the book, saw it was now back to $2.99 and bought it anyway.

Or did they get there because the ranking was higher so it was more visible to other (non-promoted) Amazon visitors? I don’t know.

That’s it. We could stop here. Want to do a little more? See below the image.

Free book promotions, follow-up sales, and Amazon category rank.

Bonus Brownie Points: Share the Love

To take it one step further, based on a concept I learned from book marketing guru Derek Murphy, I made a list of, in my case, “Amazon Best Sellers in Motivational Self-Help — I’m at #100” which was from another round of free + sales + rank improvement.

Hanging out (at #67) in the Top 100 of Amazon’s Motivational Self Help section with a humbling constellation of stars: @RyanHoliday @BishopJakes @minimalandism @GayHendricks @DaleCarnegie ‏https://buff.ly/2GicKvk

Now I have a list that’s also listing other books that I have classified as “Amazon Best Sellers” and then in a specific category (for me: Motivational Self Help).

I created that post and then individually listed each book with a tiny blurb (that I either wrote or copied from their own marketing copy), a link to their book, and even a photo using some Amazon WordPress plugin.

Linking to other books in your Best Of list.

What has happened is that some of the mere mortals (e.g. not Dale Carnegie) have retweeted or said hello to me on social, thanking me for sharing a note about them.

That’s nice. But it’s also a chance to see who’s active out there, maybe open up partnerships or at the very least get a little love from a fellow author because you did something nice.