Publishing Your Book: Amazon Free Giveaways: Part Seven

once upon After writing a book, many people want to know how one goes about publishing a book. A well-known author once said recently that “it’s no great feat to get one’s book published—it’s no great mountain to climb.” He is right, but his opinion is subjective. To you, reading this blog, it is a huge mountain to climb to get your book published. There are many paths you can take up that mountain, but it is still a huge feat.

One of the basic things you can do to raise awareness of your book on Amazon is to set up a free giveaway through the KDP system. This is an opt-in system that you can choose to join. KDP allows you five days per enrolment period. You can use those five days together or separately; and during each day of free giveaway, your book will be available for people to download for free from Amazon. It’s pretty simple, eh? Well not entirely. There are still problems, the chief one being that you still need to drive traffic to the Amazon page and encourage people to download the book.

The upside to this is that if the promotion is done properly, you will get a huge dose of publicity and a run of strong paid sales. These paid sales will drive your rankings and will turn into more sales. It takes some time to set up a successful giveaway—but it can pay off in a big way.

Free Doesn’t Mean Desirable

There are thousands of books available for free download every single month. Just because you have your book available for free, it doesn’t mean that thousands of people will automatically download it. You have to ask yourself a few questions. The first is: Does my book have an audience? The second is: Where are the people who like my book spending their time online? The third is: How am I going to reach that audience? Don’t just rely on a book being free to drive interest—try to actually seek out your audience and present them with the opportunity to download your book.

Using Freebooksy and Other Free Book Mailing Lists

There are a lot of aids to help you drive your book to a bigger audience. One of the biggest is a mailing list called Freebooksy. This is a large mailing list that goes out to readers via email. You can get your book placed on the list, if you meet their criteria, and you will find that their subscribers will start downloading your book. There are other services like this—Bookbub, etc. that perform the same job.

Rankings

Being the number one free downloaded book doesn’t mean you will necessarily become the number one paid book. It’s easier to gain a number one when the book is free, but you may find it more of a struggle to reach the paid number one position. Don’t be concerned when your free giveaway ends and you go back into the paid rankings—you may be ranked far lower—but the chances are that your ranking will climb due to the publicity you’ve received from the free giveaway.

Banners

Some authors like to add a banner to the front of their book cover. The banner can draw attention to the fact the book is free, or will be free, and people who see the book on Amazon will see the banner. Little techniques like this can really help boost your free giveaway and draw attention to your book.

YOUR VISION TORCH Series
Achieve Your Dreams, Ignite Your Vision, & Re-engineer Your Life Purpose