Why I Gave Away My Book for Free (for Two Days)
Trigger warning: this post contains lots of numbers. You have been warned.
Part zero: the introduction
Back in 2020, I spent 800 evening hours writing, editing, and designing the cover for a book on blockchain, and then self-publishing it. In general European terms, that’s the equivalent of thirty-three full-time working weeks of effort.
(I was going to put a joke in here about what the total would be for un employé du secteur public français, but I guess it’s best not to lose all the Francophones at the second paragraph.)
And that’s not including the ten years I spent researching and thinking about blockchain, but I don’t feel I can reasonably add that to the total. Or the amount of time I’ve spent promoting it with articles like this.
The result was Move Over Brokers Here Comes The Blockchain, which at 321 pages (82,670 words), I am reliably told counts as a “substantial work”. After all, it’s almost as long as the EU MiCA regulation document (98,826 words)[1].
And it’s both a lot more entertaining and informative.
By the metrics of self-publishing it did very well:
- 44 ratings on Amazon, with an average of 4.9 stars, and 18 glowing reviews
- More than 1000 purchases (eBook, hardback, and paperback) over three and a half years, earning me approximately €8,600 in royalties before taxes, and the Finnish government about €3,400 after taxes
- 30,000 pages read through Kindle Unlimited, which made me just under €100, so that’s not worth signing up for again
(I hope you are all impressed with the three-part LinkedIn humble-brag I subtly managed to slip in there.)
A quick web search shows that the average self-published book sells 250 copies, makes less than $1000, and those figures are highly skewed, because 90% of self-published books sell less than 100 copies. I suspect that 80% of self-published books sell less than 10 copies, most of which are bought by the author.
So you may be wondering:
Why did I give the eBook away for free for two days over the last weekend?
How many copies did I manage to give away?
Would I recommend other authors give away their book for free?
And what did I learn from this?
These questions, and more, will be answered in the rest of this article!
Part one: the reason
Obviously, the first and main reason I decided to give it away for free is because I am a lovely and generous person who is kind to everyone.
The second reason is because sales of the book have dropped off over the last half year, so there is not much of a loss to me if I give the electronic version away for a few days.
I’m sure there are a few sales I have missed out on, but I would wager that:
- those will be more than made up for by people who go on to buy a paper copy after reading the electronic version because they want the physical thing,
- a freebie might attract a new category of audience, and then
- that new audience may recommend it to their friends after reading it.
The third reason is to gather some marketing data.
Which leads me to the fourth reason, namely that I am starting to feel concerned that I’ve let my marketing and sales skills (what few I have) get rusty by not thinking about, well, marketing and selling.
And the final reason is because I thought it would make for an interesting article.
With that in mind, let’s go look at the data.
Part two: the numbers
My book came out in December 2020, and in that month I sold 91 copies, then 421 in 2021, 453 in 2022, and 84 in 2023. This year I’ve only shifted 29 paid-for copies so far.
Hang on, let me put that in a chart, so it’s a bit clearer:
The blue bars indicate the sales since the book first came out. We are well past the peak of the normal curve.
Free books claimed
The red bar indicates what I managed to give away over the previous two days:
222 Kindle copies!
As you can see from the chart, despite the fact that the book is as relevant today as it ever was, I am not having as much success at promoting it as I used to.
For comparison, when I gave my book on How To Build A Brand On LinkedInⓇ away for free back in 2021, the uptake was about 3,800 copies. That book was my “experimental precursor to my magnificent octopus” and I’ve regularly used it to test hypotheses I have about book selling before applying them in earnest.
I have a few theories as to why the short simple book on personal branding did so much better than the longer book on blockchain, but I don’t know for certain what the real reason is. Perhaps:
- more people are interested in personal branding than are in blockchain, or
- the personal branding book went over a tipping point on the Amazon free “best seller” charts, making it into broader and broader categories (at one point it was in the top 100 of all types of book, incongruously nestled between free thriller and romance novels
The latter theory is the more interesting one. I would love to be able to calculate what a typical give-away tipping point on Amazon is, but I simply don’t have enough books to give away to determine it.
Click conversions
I use booklinker.com to overcome the problem Amazon has with locales — if you provide a link to the Amazon US site, people in the UK, India, and Australia start messaging you to complain that they can’t see the eBook.
Booklinker tries to redirect the user to the correct site based on their location, and as a huge added advantage, it keeps track of how many clicks your link has received.
And here are the statistics they provided me with:
And so the first marketing observation for this sales experiment (and it is an experiment) is that the conversion rate is a staggering 56%.
Those of you with sales experience will interpret “staggering” as “amazingly good”, and those of you without marketing experience will think that that’s “amazingly bad”.
In this case, the sales people are right.
It is indeed astounding that, even with a free give-away that requires just one more simple click to claim the prize, almost half the people drop out. As anyone in sales knows, selling is like a 110 metres hurdles race where half the contestants drop out at each hurdle.
Hey, that last sentence is great — I’d better put it in a blockquote:
As anyone in sales knows, selling is like a 110 metres hurdles race where half the contestants drop out at each hurdle.
For comparison, when I look at the number of clicks the usual redirect link I use got (7500), and then generously assign all paid sales of the book to it (1078), that would come in at a 14% conversion rate.
Part three: the meaning of it all
So, if you are an author, should you consider giving your book away for free?
The answer is: it depends.
For starters — you have to initially sell your book. People are strange: if you give something of value away for nothing, they consider it to have less value.
This is one of the first things I learned about pricing. When I initially priced my LinkedIn book, I set it at $0.99 for the Kindle version, and sold very few. Once I bumped the price up to $4.95, sales tripled.
If your book is selling really well (for some measure of “really well” that you are happy with) then I would say no.
On the other hand, if sales have tailed off, then what do you have to lose? It becomes a gamble where the upside could be significant. You book could make it into the public eye, people might start talking about it, and it could get a second lease of life. I’ll let you know if that happens to me with Move Over Brokers Here Comes The Blockchain.
With How To Build A Brand on LinkedInⓇ it sort of worked. I sold 174 copies in the first two years, gave away 3,800 copies in the third year, and then sold 182 copies in the two years after that.
Of course marketing and sales are not an exact science. Only people who are spamming Amazon with meaningless AI-generated books have the time to conduct thorough experiments and tests to work out exactly what parameters are affecting their sales positively. The figures in the previous paragraph will have been influenced by the fact that my “reach”, as it is called in the business, has been increasing year on year as I post on LinkedIn and gain followers and, more importantly, enthusiastic fans (thank you guys — you make it all worthwhile, and I don’t just mean that financially).
And with those observations, I will leave you with the obligatory call to action that any marketing or sales post requires:
if you found the above interesting, and enjoyed my writing style, go visit my author site at https://thinklair.com and pick up a copy of one of my books.
I promise you won’t regret it. Because in marketing you’re allowed to make promises that you can’t necessarily keep.
(Apple: imagine how much better your piano crushing advert would have been if you’d just played it backwards…)
[1] I’ve read MiCA six times, and it’s not become any clearer. For comparison, five readings of MiCA is the equivalent of reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace once. I recommend you choose the latter — you may end up in jail, but at least you’ll be able to finish À La Recherche du Temps Perdu in there.
