Offering a free book: is the cleverest thing an indie author can do or the daftest?

Click here to find The Bonus by AJ Adams at your favourite bookshop FREE https://books2read.com/zeta1

 A very rough transcript :-)

Hello, I write crime and romance novels as AJ Adams. I'd like to talk about the practice of offering a free book, and whether this is the cleverest thing an indie author can do or the daftest.

When I first heard of this, I thought it was nuts. You don't get Mario Puzo or Raymond Chandler giving away a book. It not something traditional publishing houses do, but it's standard practice for indie authors.

The theory is that giving away the first book in a series means people will buy the rest.

My thought was: yes, but it's not what traditional publishing houses do. It takes six months or a year to write a book. Why give it away?

In fact, studies prove that people link price to value. Sell a bracelet for a dollar and buyers don't see the value in it. Sell it for twenty dollars, and they place a lot more value on it.

Well, said the indie author crowd. Readers want to make sure they like the book.

That's why you get the read the first few pages, was my thought. Just like you leaf through a book in a shop before buying it, online books let you read a snippet before you buy.

But the ebook market is not like the market in shops. So, I wondered if I might be wrong. Totally impossible, you might think, but seriously, I may be wrong.

So I made the Bonus free and waited to see what would happen.  That was a few months before the pandemic happened. Yeah, real pain in the bum. Everything is topsy turvy.

So here we are, two years later, and I still don't know if I offering the Bonus free is sensible and fuelling sales or whether I'm devaluing my work.

Tell me what you think?
 
In the meantime, the Bonus is perma free, so why don't you pick it up on Google Play Books, Amazon, Kobo and Barnes and Noble? Click here to find The Bonus by AJ Adams at your favourite bookshop FREE https://books2read.com/zeta1

And please help me out by telling friends about The Bonus and the Zeta Cartel series by Aj Adams

Thanks for your time. Appreciate it! See you soon!