In the past, FREE promos saw huge downloads and, although it costs plenty to advertise a free book (sometimes more than a reduced price book!), still provided a good ROI (return on investment) as a result of sales of the author’s other books, especially if the free book was #1 in a series.

I’ve seen quite a lot of reports that FREE no longer brings that ROI to many, but plenty of authors continue to set #1 in a series as a permafree, so it must work to some extent. I though it was about time to test this out for myself.

I’ve always resisted giving my books away for free. I spend a lot of time and effort writing them, not to mention the money I have invested in improving my writing skills, and in book production costs. I produce a quality product and feel I should receive remuneration in return. However, for the first time, I have a complete series to offer, with good readthrough from one book to the next, and thought I would take the plunge with a free promo to see if it was worth it.

A big Christmas promo is the backbone of my marketing strategy. I have tried advertising at all times of year, and this one consistently performs best for me. Sometimes I add a second promo around May time, to bump things back up a bit, but on the whole the increase in visibility and sales lasts several months, and I’ve not found either summer or autumn promos to be very effective, so Christmas it is.

This is what I did:

I set book #1, THE PRINCE’S MAN, to FREE on all retailers on December 16th 2022. My paid promos were not scheduled to begin until the 23rd, but with the challenge of companies closing down for Christmas, and needing to be certain that Amazon would price match to free in time for the holidays, I erred on the side of caution.

Here is the list (and prices) of the promos I booked, spread across 11 days:

• Book Rebel   $25 £21.04
• https://itswritenow.com/ free
• https://www.ereadernewstoday.com $40 £34.56       
•  https://reignofreads.com  $ 9.60   £8.70     
• https://bookbarbarian.com  $60  £54.56      
•  https://bookraid.com   $60 £51.37 (exchange rates were better that day than the above)
• https://www.thefussylibrarian.com $50 £43.94      
•  Freebooksy series promo $170.00  £153.97    
• https://www.hellobooks.com $30 £28.04      
•  https://bestbookmonkey.com  (prepaid the previous year)  
• https://www.ebookstage.com $12 £10.61

That brought me to a total ad spend of : $473.60  £406.79

I have been incredibly fortunate over the past 4 years to score a BookBub Featured Deal each Christmas, but no dice this year, and as I was experimenting, I was okay with that – in the fantasy category, an ad for a free book costs $487, which would have doubled my spend. True, the average number of downloads is 23,000, so maybe another time.

Results

To my great surprise, I had 308 downloads of The Prince’s Man in the week before any ads appeared! I have no idea how the book came to people’s attention, but it does help me to appreciate the concept of having a free starter book to a series.

The downside of free books is how many people download them but never get around to reading. I know, my Kindle is stuffed with them.

Anyway, the official sale ran from December 23rd to Jan 3rd, at which point the book reverted to its regular price of £3.99

During the sale period, the download figures were:

Amazon 5340  

Apple 181  

B&N 51 

Smashwords 4 

Vivlio 1  

Kobo ???

This is where I learned that Kobo does not report free downloads, so I can only guess at those. They are regularly roughly in line with Apple, but that’s the best I can offer.

So, total downloads of The Prince’s Man during the sale period were: 5579 (plus Kobo)

Total dowloads while priced at FREE: 5887 + Kobo, so I feel fairly confident in estimating 6,000 downloads.

How does this translate into income?

To analyse this, I took sales figures for the series over the 6 months preceding the sale (no promos in this period, this it just organic sales), and calculated average monthly sales for each of:

Profit from D2D, which covers all non-Amazon retailers, is slightly less, at 60% rather than 70% of book price, which give me an average monthly income from this series of:

Amazon:    $92.30 £81.59 

D2D:           $22.35 £20.37

                 ====      ====

Looing at the sale period:

December sales of books #2, #3 & #4:

Prince’s Son (#2) – Amazon 16 Apple 1 =17 total

Prince’s Protégé (#3) – Amazon 8

Prince’s Heir (#4) – Amazon 6

I was delighted to see some people obviously cracking straight on through the series as soon as they’d read #1, even though the numbers were not huge.

January sales:

Now to look at the effects over a longer time period.

Of course The Prince’s Man (#1) continued at FREE until the end of Jan 3rd. Over the first 3 days of January I had another 315 downloads.

One thing to take into account here, is that while The Prince’s Man reached dizzy heights in Amazon’s Top 100 Free books

the unfortunate corollary is that without paid sales, the book’s sales ranking dropped like a stone, to far, far lower than its usual standing:

• Best Sellers Rank: #449,938 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
  • #5,329 in Sword & Sorcery Fantasy eBooks
  • #7,146 in Sword & Sorcery Fantasy (Books)
  • #7,741 in Epic Fantasy (Kindle Store)

One thing I did not expect, however, was that The Prince’s Man has continued to sell, in bigger numbers than usual, even once it returned to full price.

There was also a small uptick in sales of my other books.

ROI?

Still out for debate. Clearly there is a substantial increase in sales across the board, although not as much as I’d hoped for.

January income from the series was:

Amazon $195.51 £157.89

D2D $ 85.14 £ 69.18

===== =====

$280.65 £227.07

So although well up on the average for the previous 6 months, clearly I am still out of pocket from the expense of the promo ads. I reckon it will be several months before I can safely say one way or the other that this was a failure, or a success.

On a personal level, I prefer the results I’ve had previous years from doing a $0.99 sale, rather than FREE, but I may change my mind yet, depending on the continued sales over the next few months as slower readers work their way through the series.

I did get one lovely new review from a delightful lady who got in touch to say she’d only found The Prince’s Man because it was included in one of the newletters she subscribes to that feature free books, so I gained a new fan, which is never to be sneezed at.

Further analysis

I will review figures again in a couple of months, and let you know how it’s going.

In the meantime, I will also post an analysis of which promo sites I think were worth their price, but there is enough in this post to be going on with, I think!