Amazon, Let Me Give My eBook Away!

free-ebooksI finally get a Bookbub promotion approved because I said I’d give it away for free. Goes against my Taylor Swift-like instincts but I put it down as a marketing cost. I’m selling fuck all at the moment anyway, so profits aren’t going to be hit.

(profits! lol!)

I set a date and then log in to Amazon. I’d wrongly, dumbly assumed I could set the price to zero. You can’t. Only if you’re taking part in KDP Select, which I had done about 8 months previously. You can re-enter KDP Select but you have to give Amazon exclusive rights to your book and I’d just paid to get my book listed at all the other retailers, so fuck that.

Bookbub states that listing your book for free elsewhere might get picked up by Amazon’s price match and therefore get your ebook listed for free on Amazon. So I tried that by listing it for free on Apple. Amazon’s price match ignored me so my Bookbub promotion went out with just the Apple iBooks link. I got 2 downloads at a cost of $40.

Amazon’s pricing restrictions have now resulted in me INCREASING the price of my book for a few months so I can then go back to Bookbub with a 50% discount enabling me to then reduce the price to 99p. I feel like a sofa salesman!

A book that wasn’t selling has now increased it’s price.

A book that wasn’t selling on Amazon so got listed on other retailers is then expected to remove itself from those retailers to price the book for free via KDP Select to stimulate sales? I think not, old son.

If an author much more popular than I, wanted to promote a book for free, they can on other sites. They could drive people into the loving arms of another retailer, forcing them to register an account and breaking down the barrier to them getting further books from that site in the future.

So how is Amazon’s restrictive approach to pricing helping Amazon?

I can understand Amazon don’t want to become a repository for free books to sponge off their huge traffic, but then again, I don’t think authors ideally want to give away their books for free either. It’s a marketing technique, a traffic driver, a sales stimulus, an interest piquer, a chance to gather some much needed reviews; not a business model.

This would also help authors with a backlist, they could give away the first book in a series to hook readers into the buying the rest of the series.

Amazon should allow ebooks to be sold for free without having to enroll in KDP Select to help get the sales ball rolling. They could add time restrictions (1 month per year), sales rank restrictions (no book in top 1000 can do a free giveaway), review restrictions (no book with more than 100 5 star reviews can do a giveaway), so not everyone takes the piss but enabling a vital sales tool to be used by authors struggling to get themselves out there…like me.

Authors and Amazon want the same thing, increased profits, so why not do all they can to help facilitate this?