Thursday, November 3, 2011

Free Books as Promotion

Kris Rusch has a new The Business Rusch chapter up on setting e-books temporarily free as promotion. This chapter was sparked by the kerfuffle over James Crawford's Kindle book mistakenly (it seems) being set to free on Amazon because an excerpt of a few chapters with (it seems) the same title was being given away for free over on the B&N Nook site.

Kris talks about what happened and how it was reported (and has some fairly harsh criticism for the reportage about the incident), but of even more interest, she tells about what happened when one of her own novels was recently set to free for a while by the publisher without her knowledge. Mr. Crawford is incensed at the results of his unwillingly free book, but Kris is delighted with hers. She discusses what the difference was, and why the give-away worked so well for her and so badly for Mr. Crawford. The mechanisms and strategies she discusses are very useable by self-pub writers who have the freedom to mess with their own prices as they choose. Check it out.

Angie

4 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

It would be nice to be able to set something to free and determine exactly when and where and how long it would happen.

Angie said...

Charles -- if you self-pub, you can. I've heard of glitches similar to this one happening with self-pubs, of course, because the system seems to have glitches built in, but in general if you self-pub, you can set your own price, and mess with it whenever you want.

Angie

Travis Erwin said...

The business side of writing give me heartburn. I know I gotta get over that but I'm not sure there are enough Rolaids.

Angie said...

Travis -- I think it's like most things, where when you start out there's this mountain of info to learn and it looks awful, but you learn a bit at a time and it's less and less stressful over time.

Great places for learning the business side:

http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/ -- good just to subscribe to, but in particular read the series Think Like a Publisher, The New World of Publishing, and Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing.

http://kriswrites.com/ -- subscribe to this one too, but definitely read series The Business Rusch, and The Freelancer's Guide to Survival.

Angie