Power of FREE: Selling books by giving them away!
With the economy sinking, stocks plunging, jobs being lost and more homes foreclosed on than ever before, the word "free" is music to the ears of just about everyone! Generally, when I’m offered something for free, I’ll usually take it. Why not? I have nothing to lose. If I don’t like the free item it goes straight into the trash can.
With that said, it’s pretty easy to conclude that "free" has a lot of power. It catches people’s attention and can get consumers to try something they might not normally try. What about using free to sell more books? Yes, it does seem counter-intuitive at first. But it has been shown to work, as this post points out from my good friends over at the Teleread Blog.
The post gives a very brief summary of author M.J. Rose and her decision to make her new book, The Reincarnationist, free on Amazon (aff link) until October 30. The Teleread post then links to an article that Rose wrote for The Huffington Post, where she explains her decision in terms of other items that do well as free samples:
It’s because trying something for free is the best way of discovering it. And free doesn’t mean sampling a quarter of a cookie – it means the whole cookie. It doesn’t mean someone spraying my wrist with perfume – it means them putting a small bottle of the fragrance in my shopping bag. It means spending a weekend in a hotel and taking two showers using the same soap. It doesn’t mean reading the first five pages of my book online – it means reading my whole book for free as a way of discovering me as an author.
Rose is using the same reasoning I outlined above: When something is given away for free, the consumer has nothing to lose. And if the consumer likes the free product (in this case a book), they will probably end up making a related purchase and recommending it to friends and/or family.
In fact, if you read further down Rose’s article, she describes using this same free strategy back in 1999 and 2000, when the internet was suffering from growing pains and ebooks were more novelty (no pun intended) than serious book distribution/consumption method. And it worked:
We each wound up selling many more copies of the books that we gave away than anyone expected and for each of us the experiment was a success. Back then many thought it an audacious move and even though we proved free books led to increased books sales it’s been hard for me to convince any of my publishers to try it again. Until now.
Publishers appear to be very resistant to the idea of using free to promote more sales. But Rose is very much a pioneer in this area, and we might start seeing more authors demanding a few of their titles be given away in an attempt to entice new readers.
With the economy on such shaky ground, this might just become the standard way marketing is done in the publishing world; give a book away for free and watch readers spend money on other books by the same author.
You can check out M.J. Rose’s website here: MJRose.com
What do you think? Can the power of free help sell more books in the long run? Why or why not? Leave your thoughts below as a comment. Don’t be shy, I promise not to bite!
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