How my recent promotion illustrates ebook market share

The Sixth Discipline, the first book of my two-book Haven series is always free, thanks to price-matching. Smashwords lets authors make ebooks available for free, and since that platform can also be used to push the book to iBooks, Nook, and Kobo, as well as smaller vendors (but not Kindle or Google Play), that means self-publishers can make books free on those platforms (and Nook now allows free books to be published on their platform, too). When an ebook is free elsewhere, Amazon will price-match the Kindle version. As you can see by the results below, the Kindle version matters a lot!

The Sixth Discipline was published in 2011, and had its big run in 2013 when I got a BookBub promotion for it and gave away 20,000 copies. Since then, its distrbution numbers (you can't call them sales figures when the book is free) have slowly dwindled. There are a lot of free books, many of them newer, and in a good month, I had been giving away maybe 20-30 Kindle copies, and 10-20 on all other platforms, combined. 

Update:  B&N reporting was very slow and just came in, so I changed the numbers from the original post to reflect those "sales."

The promotion consisted of paying for an entry in The Fussy Librarian daily "free books" email. That email lists links for up to five vendors. The results are in, and for the day of the promotion and the day after, I gave away this many copies:

Kindle =  377
Nook = 8
iBooks = 32
Kobo = 0
Google = 19

A few things jumped out at me. The most obvious is the dominance of the Kindle market. I gave away six times more Kindle copies than all the others combined. The lack of Kobo copies wasn't really surprising since  have never had big numbers on Kobo, but only 8 copies for Nook was telling. I do't think B&N is doing at all well with the Nook.  Also interesting is that Google Books' total was more than double Nook's, while iBooks beat out Google and Nook combined.

And of course, the whole point of paying money to give away a book is that I hope to sell the sequel, No Safe Haven.  Time will tell how that goes.

Dueling promotions and Amazon lets me see the future!

I've been running two promotions this month, one to advertise that Turnabout is only 99¢ (for a few days only) and one to advertise that The Sixth Discipline is free.

One advantage to advertising a book, even a free one, is if you sell or give away enough copies it gets into Amazon's ranked groups (100 top free science fiction, e.g,), and folks who didn't get the email promotion notice it.  Turnabout did okay, It made it to:

• #199 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Dystopian

But The Sixth Discipline jumped up to:

• #8 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction

Even though the email promotion for T6D was Friday, it's still going strong; I've given away over 200 copies today.. But in checking for free downloads via the KDP interface,I discovered something I had never noticed. Using my phone (I was walking the dog and when we stopped to rest in the shade, I checked my numbers), the Sales Dashboard tab let me select tomorrow's date as part of my date range! And when I did that, I could see I already have 23 downloads, presumably from time zones where it's already August 6. 

The screen shot below was created in Firefox, as I discovered the Chrome browser didn't let me select a one-day future date, but the Firefox version did.  I highlighted the date range so you can see it's for those two days. I couldn't include Thursday because it had over 1,000 downloads and that would make tomorrow's 23 too small to show as more than a tiny blue line.

The really odd thing is, I was using Chrome for Android on my phone when I noticed this! 

Also note, these numbers are for Amazon only. iBooks and B&N take a little longer to report "sales figures" because I get them via Smashwords. 

Achtung! The Sixth Discipline is free in the German Kindle store!

Well, Germany has fallen in line!  The Sixth Discipline is not only free in the German Kindle store, it is now #30 in free science fiction books! That was fast!

Of course, I don't think it has a whole lot of competition, but it's still nice to be up there so quickly.  Now only France and Mexico remain to be conquered.  They may be on the way, as I just checked France, and there was no price info at all. It said:

"Les informations sur les prix ne sont pas disponibles."

Google Translate tells me that means that price information is not available, which I think means they are changing it to free.  And I know enough Spanish to know the Mexican Kindle store's

"Información de precios no disponible" means the same thing. Here's hoping the book is free worldwide really soon!

Addendum: I just checked and now it's #13 in free science fiction in the German Kindle store!

Have you got a yen for some free science fiction?

The title is a rather bad pun, in honor of the fact that The Sixth Discipline is now free in Japan!

Someone must have clicked the "tell us about a lower price" link, because it's now as low as it can get.  That just leaves France, Germany, and Mexico.  For some reason, the Mexican Kindle store does not seem to offer a lower price link.  I hope someone is working on that!

Meu livro é grátis! میری کتاب مفت ہے

The title of this post means "my book is free" in Portuguese and in Urdu.  Apparently, there's a worldwide demand for free science fiction novels, because The Sixth Discipline is now free in the Kindle store in Brazil and also, the Kindle store in India!

That's a total of seven Kindle stores, plus iBooks, Nook, Smashwords, Kobo, Sony and some other retailers.  Check the Free eBook tab for all the info.

Portuguese is enough like Spanish I am sure that part of the post title is correct, but I only hope Google Translate didn't let me down on the Urdu.

How do you say “free” in Italian?

It turns out it's gratuito. I looked it up because Amazon has made The Sixth Discipline free in the Italian Kindle store! I'm not quite sure why the book is free in the US, UK, Canadian, and now Italian Kindle stores, and not the others, but I suspect it's because someone in those countries clicked on the “tell us about a cheaper price” link. Brazil, Japan, Spain, Germany, France, and India, it's your turn. Demand my book to be livre, 自由に, libre, kostenlos, librement, and मुक्त!

Get your free short story here!

I added a page to the blog called Free Story! And if you click on that page, it will (no surprise ) tell you how to get a free story.  This particular story is a fantasy I wrote, a sort of riff on Sleeping Beauty but instead of sleeping, my beauty is weaving— on a loom, not weaving through traffic or falling down drunk or anything like that.

This is an actual short story, not a novella like Where Magic Rules, so instead of selling it, I'm offering to send the story for free to anyone who asks for it.

Click the Free Story tab for the details.

The Sixth Discipline is free on Kobo!

I didn't think Kobo price-matched for books that are free, but apparently they do because The Sixth Discipline is now FREE on Kobo!  I updated the Free eBook page (see tab above right) to include it. That means the book is now free almost everywhere!

Kindle (US only)
iBooks
Nook (Barnes & Noble)
Diesel
Smashwords
Kobo
Blio

The only exception is the Sony ebookstore, which seems to take forever to change anything (and they still don't have my fifth book Shades of Empire, either!).

On giving away ebooks: How much is “free” worth?

One question I get asked frequently, mostly by other writers, is “Is it worth it to give an ebook away for free?” It sounds so counter-intuitive to say that the way to sell books is to give them away to as many people as you can, and yet I have to say, the answer is, for an unknown author, yes, it's definitely worth it.

There are several factors that influence the success of a giveaway as a tool to sell books. The first is what platform are you giving your book away on? If you post a book on your blog and allow folks to download it for free, that will help you get readers only if your blog already has a ton of followers; and if you post it in Mobi or epub format, you will only get readers who also know how to side-load a book to their ereader. Putting the book somewhere that people go to find books is a much better plan. Smashwords makes it really easy to make a book free, and Apple iBooks and Barnes & Noble Nook will price match that, so you get more bang for your non-buck than you would just from Smashwords. Sony used to price-match, but it doesn't look they they're still doing that. Generally speaking, the Kindle store will usually yield the best numbers, in terms of a giveaway, but even with a book being free in the Kindle store, you need to advertise it, especially because unlike Smashwords, Amazon doesn't make it easy. You can only make a Kindle book free if it's in the KDP Select program (which means it only be sold as an ebook through the Kindle store), and it can be free only five days out of 90.

So many people have taken this route that it is actually difficult to give away a book in huge numbers. You should advertise the book being free on your blog, on Twitter and Facebook, and anywhere else you can find. There are lots of site to do this on, but be aware that many of them either charge up front or ask for donations.

I have made three books free in the last year or so, at different times. I launched my two most recent books on KDP Select and made them both free on different days. I gave away several hundred copies of each book, and after it was free, I did find I got more reviews and more sales after the books came off being free. I didn't try to make my first three books free on Kindle via KDP Select because there were already out there on many platforms and it is often difficult to get smaller vendors to pull books back when you “unpublish” from Smashwords. I did make my first book free on Smashwords, and after iBooks and Nook stores showed it as free, Amazon price-matched it to zero (although only in the US Kindle store)*, and I have now given away well over 2,000 copies of it! The big advantage to me is that my first book The Sixth Discipline has a direct sequel called No Safe Haven. NSH has only one review on Amazon, and yet it is now my best selling book! The increase in sales to NSH from making TSD free is much greater than the increase to the other two books that were free for a time.

Even if you only have one book out there, making it free in the Kindle store helps by getting your book into many readers' buying history (“People who bought this item also bought . . .”). It can also increase your chance of getting reviews.

Things to keep in mind when doing a promotion:

• Not everyone who gets your book for free will read it.
• Not everyone who reads it will like it; it's always possible you could get a negative review from a free copy, especially if the book doesn't live up to (or match) the blurb.
• There are tons and tons of free books out there, so you need to get the word out!
• The market size of your book still applies, even when it's free; check out the top 100 free Kindle books to see the genres and authors that are doing best.

* Important note! You cannot count on Amazon price matching Barnes & Noble for free books.

Price-matching is a wonderful thing!

The Sixth Discipline is still free in the Kindle store! This is the seventh day it has been free, so clearly Amazon doesn't impose the 5-day limit that it applies to Kindle Select books.

"The Sixth Discipline is a Science Fiction story set in the far-future upon a planet called Haven that has been colonised by several different human factions. The main character Ran-Del Jahanpur is part of the Sansoussy faction, who live a basic existence in the forests that reminded me of native Americans who have developed a variety of psychic abilities. Whilst out hunting Ran-Del is kidnapped by people from the city of Shangri-la who are technologically advanced. The story then follows his captivity and subsequent introduction to the wonders of the city as well as the political intrigue of the ruling families that has led to his captivity in the first place."

"... there is a fundamental romantic element to the plot but I felt the book was more a sci-fi adventure novel that explores some of the politics and interactions between various different factions on Haven."

"The story itself is very interesting and imaginative..."
                          --The Eclectic Bookshelf book review blog

The Sixth Discipline is still free on Kindle!

I don't now how long it will last, but The Sixth Discipline is still free in the Kindle store as of now. It's actually doing pretty well, and in the two days it has been free, Amazon has given away over 500 copies. That's only in the US Kindle store, of course, as Amazon doesn't seem to be price-matching internationally. TSD made it into the top 20 free science fiction books, which is really nice! The rankings change every hour or so, so it's hard to know for sure, but I think the best it did was this afternoon when it hit 14th in the science fiction list, but I only got a snap of it as 15th on the list,