Free Download Days: Where to Promote Your Free Books


Giving away copies of your book can be a fantastic way to get more sales and has numerous other benefits too.
Benefits include:
  1. More reviews posted. If you get a lot of reviews posted you could make it into Amazons Top Rated lists gaining you extra visibility.
  2. Creates a buzz about your book. More people reading it generally means more people talking about it.
  3. Popular books will get promoted by Amazon for free. If you book is downloaded by lots of people and enters the best seller lists for free books Amazon will include your book in their suggestions.
  4. Can increase number of copies borrowed from the lending library earning you money from the monthly fund.
If you published your book through Amazon's KDP program you can set upto 5 free promotion days over a 90 day period. It's very easy and quick to do:

1) Log into KDP and on your bookshelf page click on the book of choice and then on "Actions". Go down to the bottom and select "Manage promotions"


2) A new window will open. You can now give a name to your free download day and set the dates. On the date you set Amazon will make your book available as a free download.


N.B. On the right you will be able to control the number of free days you still have available to use.
Once you've got the free day scheduled you need to let people know about it. Whilst people may happen to come across your book while they search Amazon on that day you will considerably increase the number of downloads your book gets if you promote your free days.
Here's a list of some sites that post about free download offers:

You can, and should, also contact people via social media letting them know your book will be available on certain dates as a free download. There are loads of pages on Facebook and profiles on Twitter that promote free downloads.
Also don't forget to make a banner (visual content gets better results than just plain text) to promote the event and post it to your website, blog and social media channels. 
This is an example of a promotional banner I made for when my books were available as free download in honour of International Book Giving Day last month.

How do you promote your free download days? Know of any great sites that I've not included in this list? 

5 Comments

  1. RachelRueben5 March 2013 at 15:25

    Great tips, I had no idea about most of these places! Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jo Linsdell6 March 2013 at 13:03

      You're welcome Rachel. There's are loads more out there too. For the best results target those that specialise in your genre.

      Delete
  2. Gina @ Hott Books5 March 2013 at 20:05

    have you heard that a lot of them have stopped posting because of Kindle's new policies?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jo Linsdell6 March 2013 at 13:02

      I'm aware of these new policies but honestly haven't noticed much change in the posting of book offers... not yet anyway.

      Not all sites promoting free days use affiliate links and some that do post books at cost too and so aren't effected by Amazon's new updates.




      Delete
  3. free books download12 April 2013 at 11:14

    I love getting free books! We want online free books. free books.
    Thank you

    ReplyDelete

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