permafree

Quick Link: The Power of a Permafree Book with Jennifer Waddle

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

One great and often overlooked marketing tool is the permafree ebook, especially for series. You can find a great post and podcast by Shelly Hitz and Jennifer Waddle that will help you utilize this great tool. Check it out!

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The Power of a Permafree Book with Jennifer Waddle

What is a permafree book and how can it help you in your marketing?

In today’s training, Jennifer Waddle will be joining us to show us how permafree book has helped her succeed in marketing her books.

The Power of PermaFree Book

SHELLEY: Welcome to Author Audience Academy. Today I’m rolling out the red carpet and inviting you into my community to show you behind the scenes look at what’s working for authors like you.

In this episode, I want to position the spotlight on one of my members, Jennifer Waddle. Welcome, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Thank you, Shelley. It’s great to be here.

Shelley: Yes! I’m so excited to have you share on today’s episode. Before we dive in I want to just share a brief bio about you.

Jennifer Waddle is an author, speaker, and contributor who write books for women in the trenches of life. Her goal is to help Christian women face issues that stand in the way of who they were created to be. I love that!

She’s also a children’s book author of a brand new series called “A Day in the Life of a Little Kid”. This book is available on Amazon. Jennifer resides with her family near the foothills of Cheyenne Mountain. And you live here in Colorado Springs, right where I am as well! We’ve attended the same church!

You can connect with her at JenniferWaddleOnline.com.

So for this week’s center stage spotlight training, I’m going to have Jennifer share a specific success strategy. I’m excited to learn from each other on being able to accomplish your goals as an author. And we will be sharing some specific strategies that have worked for Jennifer.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

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Breaking Free – What Happened When I Left KDP Select

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This post by Nick Stephenson originally appeared on his site on 6/6/14.

“KDP Select is evil”. “Free promotions are pointless”. “Nick, you’re an idiot”. These are things I hear on a daily basis, the latter usually being something I say to myself when I’m looking in the mirror. As for the first two, I talk to a lot of authors who have a strong opinion on the relative merits of signing up for 90 days of exclusivity with Amazon, and the words “shackled” and “dungeon” come up a lot. It’s the same for free days – half of authors think they’re a God-send, the other half would rather cut off their own limbs with a rusty spatula than offer their work gratis. And that’s cool, I don’t have anything against people having wildly different opinions – and there are plenty of authors making a decent income without touching free promotions, and there are plenty who swear by them. But I like to look at the cold, hard numbers before coming to a conclusion, as everybody’s mileage seems to vary.

The two main strategies for free books I see most often are:

1. A variety of titles signed up to KDP Select, with rotating free promotions on each book. This is pretty easy to do with the 5 free days you get to play with under the KDP Select contract.

2.Titles NOT in KDP select, and up on other vendors, with the first book in the series permanently free. This is also pretty easy to do.

There are pros and cons for both approaches, but last month was the first time I’d tried option number (2). I’ve had a bunch of emails and comments asking for me to report back on the results, so here’s the skinny:

Income Report: All Books in KDP Select

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes sales graphs and detailed analysis, on Nick Stephenson’s site.

 

Playing with Permafree Books – The Results

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This post by Nick Stephenson originally appeared on his site on 1/9/14.

I’ve been experimenting with a permafree book over the last few weeks – admittedly, I’m a little late to the game, but with so many indie authors using this approach, I figured it was time to dip my toes in the water. I chose my shorter title, “Paydown” (a 95 page novella) as the guinea pig for this little experiment. The book has been well received, with a 4.2* rating on Amazon over 15 reviews at the time the title first went free. A few weeks later, reviews are still good, averaging 4.1* over 28 reviews. But I’m far more interested in measuring the ROI, so here’s the breakdown for y’all:

Price of Paydown prior to permafree = $0.99c
Average daily revenue for Paydown prior to permafree = $2.20
Average daily unit sales for Paydown prior to permafree = 6

Granted, I only had the book up for sale for 2 weeks before going free, but that gives you a rough idea. Essentially, for every day the book is free, I’m losing $2.20 off the bat (I figured I could live with that). So how did jumping on the permafreebie bandwagon help sales across my other titles? Here’s a lovely graph:

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes a breakdown of the sales figures, detailed analysis, and conclusions, on Nick Stephenson’s site.