Offering Free eBooks to Build Readership in Science Fiction

There are two ways to get your SciFi novel offered for free on Kindle. The first and easier way is to join the Kindle Select program, which allows you to pick five days to offer the eBook for free every 90 day contract period. The main advantage of Select is that the book will always be free for Amazon Prime and Kindle Unlimited subscribers, but Amazon will pay you when they borrow the book, approximately four tenths of a penny per page read. That may not sound like much, and unless you write very long books, you'll earn more, for me, around twice as much, if the reader pays cash. The main drawback of Select is your books must be exclusive to Amazon for as long as you remain in the program.

The second way of getting your science fiction offered for free on Kindle is to NOT join Select, publish the book elsewhere (Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple, and Google Play) and get the price in that store set to $0.00. If your book is selling enough copies on Amazon, usually a sales rank in the 20K range will do it, Amazon will notice in one of their weekly updates and price-match the book to free. This is known as the "permafree" method, since your book is free all the time. The advantage of having a book free all of the time on Kindle is that you'll get regular, steady downloads, so if it's book #1 in a series, you have a chance to promote the later numbers. The main drawback is that with Kindle Unlimited, heavy readers don't even bother looking for free books anymore, and it's gotten harder to find them for readers who do search them out. Most authors these days view the permafree method as obsolete for that reason. Amazon ranks free books seprately from paid books, which means that your book will not appear on Also Bought lists of popular paid science fiction novels, even if you are getting more downloads than they are.

The ironic thing about offering free books is that they require paid promotions in order to generate large numbers of downloads. Another advantage of Select and promo days over permafree is that the Select book is generating real sales outside of its promo period, so it's usually much more visible in the Amazon catalog, and when it flips to free, many more people will find it. Combined with paid promotions on Kindle reader mailing lists, which you can't run all the time anyway, it's common to see science fiction novels from unknown writers pop into the top 100 free Kindle books on Amazon for a day or two during a promotion. During that time, they probably get more downloads than a relatively popular permafree book gets over three months. The main gamble is whether or not you can line up enough meaningful promotions for the Select book. A single promotion from BookBub will probably get you top 100, the last one I ran got me in the top 10 and resulted in 30,000 downloads across all stores. But word in author's groups is that BookBub no longer hits those numbers.

The main competitive wedge you have on Kindle is price. That's how self published science fiction writers have managed to compete heads-up with the major trades, and there are a dozens of self published science fiction writers who are earning a very good living selling a mix of 99 cent and $2.99 ebooks. The 99 cent price used to be critical to getting sales up and running from an unknown fiction writer, as opposed to nonfiction, where readers often have limited choices for a particular niche subject. Many authors err by believing that there's no difference between a 99 cent cover price, of which Amazon pays the author 35 cents per copy sold, and a $2.99 cover price, of which Amazon pays the author $2.09 per copy sold, due to the royalty rate changing from 35% to 70% at the $2.99 level. But 99 cents was the price where readers were more willing to take a gamble.

I only have one book at 99 cents these days and while it helps in overseas stores, it might actually hurt in the US at this point since people may associate cheap with bad. I haven't completely given up on offering free books, which helped launch my career, and I'm currently offering four of my SciFi book free, with no obnoxious sign-ups. I formatted the books for reading in a web browser, but you can also download ePub files or AZW3 for Kindle if you know how to sideload files. The ePub works on most devices, and is also handy if you have AI reading books to you.