We’ve chatted about pricing the first ebook in a series at 99 cents or even giving it away for free as a way to get readers to check out your work (and, we hope, go on to buy the rest of the series!). If you’ve been wondering if this is actually working today, then you’ll want to check out this interview with indie fantasy author, Nicholas Taylor.
Welcome, Nick! It looks like it’s been a little over a year since you published your first novel as an ebook. What was your first year as an indie e-publisher like?
First thank you so much for having me on your blog; it is very sweet of you. I wish I could say that my first year in publishing was an amazing slam dunk but it wasn’t. Like most indie authors I had to learn things the hard way (by screwing up).
My first book Legon Awakening was first a podcast on Podiobooks.com back in 2007. So my first task was to take my raw scripts for the podcast and clean them up for a book. It was a long process to say the least but a good one at the same time. Over the last few years I have had to learn a lot about publishing, I’ve had editor drama, new cover art, learning how to layout in the interior of the a book- you name it. It was a lot of fun and gave me tools that I will use for the rest of my publishing life.
At some point, you decided to give away your first fantasy novel for free. What prompted the price drop?
It was a combination of things that prompted that price drop. First off I have to say that when it comes to this business we have to put on several hats. First is your writer’s hat. It’s the hat that you use to write a book and when you have this hat on the thought of giving your baby away for free can be appalling. And that’s where you need your publisher hat. This hat is a business man or woman and frankly it doesn’t care about the writing hat’s feelings. Its job is to increase your bottom line.
It was in this thought of mind when Brian Rathbone talked about a strategy that he was using on his Dawning of Power trilogy. He had the first book free and it was moving and moving well. I liked the idea. Using a loss leader is nothing new in marketing and I remember that even in books it had been used. I remember reading a series by Charlie Huston about vampires in New York. I don’t read a lot of books like that but the first book was free and I was enamored with my new Kindle app so I got it. After reading the first book I went out and spent $40 on the rest of the series. Brian was doing the same thing and he too was seeing success. Shortly after that I started hearing about Brain Pratt and how well he was doing with free.
When everything finally clicked home with me I was excited, but I knew that the key to using free was to have other books that weren’t free. In short I needed to get off my butt and write Legon Ascension and start building a backlist.
As you know, Amazon doesn’t let indies set the price below $0.99 from the KDP dashboard. How did you go about getting your work listed for free?
That’s correct, the Kindle and the Nook store won’t let you set your book at free. BUT Smashwords does. So here’s what you have to do. Set your book at free on Smashwords and let it flow out to Nook and Sony and at some point in time Kobo. Get a reader to go onto Amazon and right below your books sales rank is a link to report a lower price. It will ask for links to the free books on BN and Sony etc. From there Amazon will get its knickers in a dither and do one of two things- either A send you a nasty gram telling you that your book has been price matched or B they just price match the book.
I know authors that got the nasty grams. I didn’t get one; I wanted one but alas. Now we have tried this on other books. It was working wonderfully for awhile but not so much anymore. I don’t know why but some titles are staying at $0.99. I don’t know if this has to do with the length of books or if Amazon doesn’t see value in listing them for free… I don’t know. But I hope it works for you guys.
Once your book was listed for free, it really jumped to the top of the charts. I remember you tweeting about it. What other promotion did you do?
Ok, here is the rub: I didn’t do any promotion… I was going to but I didn’t need to. I did tweet about the book going free and posted some status updates on Facebook, but that was it. My initial plan was to get the book listed for free and then on Friday the 17th I was going to spend around $200 on Google adds and do Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads and blog pushes.
You see, Amazon will sell your book for you in two different ways. First is with their “people who bought this also bought this” section at the bottom of every book page. This is great for long term sales. The second is with bestseller charts. I knew that if I could move 200 units I could start showing up on those charts and from there my cover art would do the rest.
I want to give a quick tip here for people who want to rush the free chart. My book had all of three reviews at the time and my description while adequate wasn’t anything that was amazing. My book moved because of one thing and one thing alone- my cover art. People don’t see your books description if they don’t click on the cover, so you have to have amazing art work. Now the first thing authors ask me when they see my book is who is your artist and is he taking on new clients. Yes he is, his name is Mike Brooker. When Brian and I were talking about Awakening going free he said that with the cover I had it would move 20,000 units by the end of June and I thought he was just being nice.
Now I also want to say that I went free at the right time. I don’t mean the right book at the right time but literally the time. Amazon was wrapping up its sunshine sales that devastated so many indie authors sales. For me it was driving a crazy amount of traffic to Amazon and its bestseller pages where my book was listed along side of the sunshine books.
And the question everybody’s going to be wondering: how much did it affect sales of the second book in your series (currently listed at $4.99)? Are you earning more now that you’re giving one book away for free?
The sales on book two have skyrocketed.
I will go ahead and share some numbers. Prior to this free run I was selling Legon Awakening at $0.99 and moving about a copy a day. The second book Legon Ascension was moving about a book every other day. Late in the evening on June 15th Amazon listed Legon Awakening for free. As of the end of the month, it is just shy of 23,000 copies downloaded. Legon Ascension is $4.99. I knew at this price point it wasn’t going to be an impulse buy. People were going to have to read and like Awakening before they would buy Ascension.
I thought I would see sales go up in about two months. It turns out that people read fast and starting on the 16th sales for Legon Ascension started to climb. I went from 3 sales a week to around 25 to 30 a day. Legon Ascension ended June well over the 400 mark and paid for the entire publishing cost of the book in that two and half week period.
Do you want to tell us what’s next for you? A third book in the series? Something else?
I know I’ve been long winded so I’ll keep this brief. Right now I am finishing up the last book in the Legon series. It’s called Legon Restoration and should be dropping sometime in September. After that I have another series which will start coming out later this year.
Sounds great. Thanks, Nick!
Lindsay, thank you again so much for having me on your blog it’s been a blast and if anyone has any questions for me please feel free to ask or visit me at www.nicholastaylor.co or you can email me direct at nick at Legonbook.com. Thank you.
You can also find Nick on…
Lindsay, another great interview.
Nick, I’m intrigued by the idea that you considered Google ads
I would have thought the number of non-buyers clicking through could make that a very expensive way of garnering sales (and wide open to abuse by a malicious rival!).
I’ve also heard that Google Ads will not allow an advertiser to link to a third part sales site and Amazon, etc, would be classed as such.
Does anyone know of any indie writer who has used Google Ads successfully?
Mark,
You need to link your add to a splash page for your book and then it can go to amazon. This worked well for Brian Rathbone, he was able to use $100 worth of clicks to start charting. But you need to do your homework and make sure you are looking at search terms that get a lot of hits and are your target customer. We looked at terms like “free kindle book”, it gets a lot of hits and you know its people looking for free books.
I don’t think that ads are a silver bullet or even a good long term approach, but I do think they can start the ball rolling if used right.
Wonderful and information article. I understand the trial by error deal. I always feel like I’ve hit the gold mine when someone’s willing to share the inside deal of what really worked for them.
Your cover art is amazing, Nick. Thanks for sharing your journey into publishing. All success to you.
Right now Smashwords is out of free ISBN’s, so have to wait for new ones to get meandered into Nook, etc … until they get a new batch.
Thanks for another insightful article, Lindsay.
Thanks for the interview, Nick, and thanks for reading, folks!
@Mark and @Nick I’d probably pick Goodreads over Google ads (both pay-per-click) since GR has the potential for a little viral action with readers adding your books to their lists. Also, the entire audience is full of readers. That said, there are those $50 and $100 trial offers out there for opening an Adwords account (I’ve usually seen these as bonuses when signing up for web hosting at some companies), so if you can get the money for free, that’s a great way to try it out.
@Reena Yup! I think we’re trial-and-erroring everything, haha.
@Mary Thanks for reading! Hope you’re getting some downloads of your stories on Smashwords. 🙂