Looking at the Top 100 Free Bestsellers List in the Kindle Store and it’s remarkable to see so many Publishers and Authors using free books as a cheap means of marketing (at the moment there are 41 free new books in the Top 100).
In 2008 the first few authors tried free as a marketing tool. In 2009 the trend got stronger and two of the authors to really use free as an intelligent marketing strategy were Robin Hobb and Naomi Novik. Their success started a trend and the number of free book offers grew steadily. Now in 2010 we are seeing Free hit an all time high.
Growth in Free Book Offers over the Years
The rate at which the use of free books as marketing is growing is astounding -
- 2008 – Just a handful of free books. Note that this list of free books in 2008 is mostly books outside Amazon.
- 2009 – 166 free kindle books. That’s nearly 14 free books a month. The rise over the course of the year is fascinating -
1. December 2009 – 25 free kindle store books, 39 free outside the kindle store.
2. November 2009 – 34 free kindle store books, 7 free outside the kindle store.
3. October 2009 – 13 free kindle store books, 4 free outside the kindle store.
4. September 2009 – 14 free kindle store books, 12-16 free outside the kindle store.
5. August 2009 – 14 free kindle store books, 13 free books outside the kindle store.
6. July 2009 – 13 free kindle book store books, 12 free outside.
7. June 2009 – 12 free in the kindle store, 6 free outside.
8. May 2009 – 7 free in the kindle store, 8 free outside.
9. April 2009 – 5 free in the Kindle Store, 18 free outside.
10. March 2009 – 27 free in the Kindle Store (17 are Harlequin romance novels), 7 free outside.
11. February 2009 – 1 free in the Kindle Store, 5 free outside. This might not be accurate.
12. January 2009 – 1 free in the Kindle Store, 6 free outside. This might not be accurate. - It all started in March 2009 when both Naomi Novik and Robin Hobb hit the jackpot. By giving away the first book in a series they were able to drive sales of the rest of the books in the series. It led to more and more free kindle book offers right up to the end of the year when we had 59 free books in November and December.
- How is 2010 turning out? Well, May 2010 has seen 30 free books in the first 20 days.
- April was even better with 31 free kindle book offers and an additional 28 books that were free probably due to a Harper Collins pricing mistake.
In 2008 we used to get a few free books a month if we were lucky. In 2009 it was a free book every few days. Now, in 2010, we’re on the verge of getting a few free books every single day.
More than one free book a day in 2010?
Consider the last two months – In 50 days in April and May we’ve had 89 free books. That’s just ridiculous.
We’re at the point where we could choose to read 1 to 1.5 books a day for the rest of 2010 without ever paying for one. Obviously, that becomes really difficult to do. Which begs the question -
Is free beginning to lose its power?
Perhaps now that we readers are inundated with free books using free as a strategy makes much less sense for authors. Look at your Kindle - you probably have a lot of unread free books - as do the majority of Kindle owners.
Customer Acquisition Costs and Downloads Vs Actual Customers
Let’s start with why free makes for such good marketing.
Free Book Offers drastically cut Customer Acquisition Costs
In any business we have customer acquisition costs. The business figures out what a customer will be worth and then spends some of that amount to ‘acquire’ the customer. For AT&T and Verizon those costs reach over $100 per customer. It’s even higher for banks and satellite TV companies.
With free book offers Publishers could suddenly cut out all the marketing and advertising and other costs and hand out a free ebook copy and convert some of the people who got the free book into customers.
The customer acquisition costs became ridiculously low.
That’s why it makes so much sense to hand out the first book in a series free. That’s why releasing a free older book when an author releases a new book is so effective. You see the effect instantly – Often you’ll see the free book at the top of the Movers and Shakers List (or the Genre List) and further down you’ll see the 2nd book in the series. A little further down you’ll see the third book in the series.
It worked beautifully for most of 2009.
However, we now have a problem.
Customer Acquisition only happens when customers read the book and get hooked
In May 2009 there were 7 free book offers in the Kindle Store. Probably 2 or 3 fell in your areas of interest and you probably read one or two of them.
In May 2010 there are already (in 20 days) 30 free book offers. That’s over 4 times the number of books. It’s also many more books falling into your areas of interest. You still have the same time constraints so you’re only going to read one or two (or at most 3) of them.
That means there are a lot of authors with free book offers for whom customer acquisition fails completely – despite the free book offer. Customer acquisition is very different from the free book being downloaded.
The Tragedy of the Commons
Free book offers work very well when there are relatively few of them. If there are 2 free mystery novels a month those two authors get really good exposure and acquire a lot of new customers.
If, however, there are 10 free mystery novels offered up in a month (and at our current rate we will soon reach that point) then those 10 authors see far less exposure. In addition, readers get desensitized to the ‘offer’ part and start devaluing books in general.
As a whole it hurts every mystery author to offer up books for free and kill both the value of books and the value and novelty of the ‘free book offer’ promotion. However, it benefits each one of them individually so they will keep doing it.
This is why Amazon has the $1 minimum price and it also plays a part in the cut-off for getting 70% royalties being $2.99. Amazon are ensuring that books keep their value and people can’t use low-priced books as a marketing move without paying a cost for it.
However, people will – every smart independent author will still sell their books for $1. Evey smart author will still offer free books. It’s just too powerful - individual authors don’t see and don’t care that the totality of offers kills the value of books.
A world where every author has free book offers
We are at somewhere between 5% and 15% ebooks. Already we’re seeing over 1.5 free book offers a day. As ebooks rise so will offers.
Soon the status quo will be -
- The first book in every series is free.
- Some authors (and they’ve already begun to do it) make the first and second books in their series free.
- Every author makes one or two of their past books free when they release a new book.
- Authors giving away books for free hoping for payback later. We’ve already begun to see this from some authors. These are the smart ones. The smartest ones are finding a customer concern like DRM or ebook rights and rallying their free offers around that.
- A rare few authors will start offering customers money and/or incentives to try out their book. They will be the pioneers – the equivalent of the authors in 2008 who started offering free books.
If your marketing budget is $10,000 then why not offer $1 each to the first 10,000 people who actually finish the book and review it?
It sounds crazy – However, it’ll guarantee lots of reviews and if you believe in your work you have to assume they will be good reviews. Simplify it and offer $10 to the first 1,000 people who each post a 300 word review on Amazon.com. Suddenly, your book is one of the most reviewed books on Amazon.
There is no Barrier to Entry
This is a topic for a separate post. However, it’s worth considering one key aspect about using free as a marketing tool – Anyone can leverage it.
- Almost anyone can self-publish now.
- Each one of these authors can leverage free – thanks to the Internet. In the Kindle Store they can’t hit free but they can price their book at $1.
- There are enough readers willing to give new authors a chance.
Not only do we have a really powerful strategy (free as a marketing tool) we also have no barriers to people using it – any author in the world can leverage it. It costs next to nothing.
Basically, we’re moving to a world where readers evaluating authors based on free (or very cheap) books is the status quo. More on this soon.
Filed under: free books Tagged: | free as a strategy, free book statistics
I am a librarian and for sure the free books on the Kindle are not what the average patron would ever read except if it is a novel for students
Hmm, I gotta say, I have downloaded 2 books that led me to puchase an entire series by an author, and if that second book by Robin Hobb goes down below $10, I will buy it too. I really like the idea because I have found a few authots I like that I enver would have tried othewise!
What I normally do at the library is go to the new release section, and grab 6 things that I havent read before. Not much different than downloading these free ebooks, really. The one execption is that I can count of the rest of the series being there for purchase, at the library sometimes they only carry the first book of a series.
The thing is, most of the free books in 2010 have been books in very specific genres that most people have no use for (Christian novels and romance novels). There could be 500 of those a month and I’d still have nothing to read.