Free promotion for Stephen King fans

My Kindle sales have gradually declined over the past few months, although I seem to have racked up some sales on other platforms through Smashwords since pulling my books out of the overly-restrictive KDP exclusive program.

I hadn't got around to uploading Shining in the Dark - Stephen King: Page to Screen, my non-fiction book on four classic Stephen King books and movies, to Smashwords. I guess in part this was because it doesn't feel like one of my 'proper' books. It was the first thing I experimented with in e-publishing though, and still sells a copy or so a month. I guess you could do worse if you're a college student looking for ideas on a dissertation. That's exactly how Shining in the Dark began life of course - as the final piece of coursework en route to my glorious 2:1 Bachelor of Arts from Stirling University. I'm told the tutors still hold that up as an example of how you can write a passing dissertation about anything.

Anyway, I decided that since I wasn't doing anything else with it, I might as well sign this one back up with KDP Select again and see if running a free promotion might give my other book sales a shot in the arm. Maybe Amazon has sorted its ranking algorithm so that giveaways actually help sales, like they used to. I'm not holding my breath.

The book is a nice quick read at around 100 pages, and looks at the novels Carrie, The Shining, Christine and The Shawshank Redemption, and the respective movie adaptations by De Palma, Kubrick, Carpenter and Darabont. If you're a fan of King or any of those movies, what do you have to lose?

You can get the book free for Kindle all day on Wednesday 1st May from Amazon US and Amazon UK.

Why I'm leaving Amazon's KDP Select program... and how I'm going to save you 99 cents

Having signed up to Amazon’s KDP Select program for most of the year, I’ve decided that it’s time to experiment with making my books available on other platforms.

KDP Select requires you to make Amazon your exclusive sales platform for a period of 3 months at a time. In return, they give you the option to make your book free for up to 5 days in that period (normally the lowest you can price your book is $0.99), and your book is eligible for lending in the Kindle library (which means you get a royalty for each ‘borrow’ by an Amazon Prime member).

I’ve had mixed results with the free promotions tool. In theory, the benefit is that if lots of people download your book for free, it bumps it up the sales chart and means you appear in the ‘customers who bought this also bought this’ cross-promotion. I had some success with this a few months ago when a free promo over three days led to several hundred paid sales of Halfway to Hell.

Lately, however, I've found that the free promotions have been having less and less of an effect on paid sales. I’ve heard that Amazon has changed its algorithm so that free ‘sales’ no longer have an impact on paid sales rankings… rendering what was the main perk of KDP Select pretty much useless.

So my decision is a no-brainer – I’ll still be in a relationship with Amazon, but it's no longer fulfilling all my needs. Therefore I’m going to screw around a bit behind Amazon’s back and see other sales platforms on the side at weekends.

I’ve uploaded all of my Kindle books to Smashwords. It’s not as pretty as Amazon at first glance, but I quickly discovered that the formatting and submissions process is much, much more straightforward compared to Amazon's borderline-sadistic formatting gauntlet.

Smashwords allows customers to buy directly from them, and also distributes books which meet their vetting guidelines to Amazon’s competitors, like Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, Sony, Diesel etc, meaning your ebook isn’t limited to Kindle owners. Smashwords provides an even better royalty rate than Amazon (80% as compared to a maximum 70%), and you have more control over how you choose to sell your book. You can specify any sample size up to 50%, and even better, you can make books free all of the time.

Obviously, I don’t want to make my all of my books free, but this provides a great marketing tool that is, at present, jealously-guarded by Amazon. I’ve blogged before about my idea of using short story bundles as ‘singles’ to promote my ‘album’ (i.e. the novel), but this lets me go one step further.

I’ve selected one of my short stories – ‘The Room’, from the collection The Misfortune Teller – to be permanently free through Smashwords and its associated vendors. ‘The Room’ is a 4,000-word psychological thriller, a sort of Facebook-age Rear Window. I picked it for a couple of reasons: firstly it’s one of my best stories, and secondly because the subject matter is appropriate to an electronic book marketed via social networking. Naturally, the package includes the first chapter of Halfway to Hell. By making the story absolutely free to anyone, I can get the maximum number of people to read it. If the people who read ‘The Room’ like it, they’ll read the sample chapter. If they like the sample chapter, they can buy the book.

Smashwords doesn’t have the same kind of traffic as Amazon, and most people don’t sell as many copies through this platform as they would on Amazon, but the flexibility you get makes it more than worthwhile.

The other thing I’m hoping will happen is that, now that I’ve also published ‘The Room’ to Kindle at the minimum price, Amazon will honour their price match promise and reduce the story to free for Kindle as well. I've already sold one copy at 99 cents, which actually irritates me. I don't want to sell one copy at 99 cents, I want to give away thousands of copies at 0 cents. I want to give as many people as possible the opportunity to read my work gratis.

If you’d like to be one of them, you can download your free copy of 'The Room' for any platform direct from the link below.

As I said, it’s also available at Amazon, but don’t buy it from there as it will cost you 99 cents that you don't need to spend. Feel free to use Amazon’s ‘report a lower price’ button to nag them about this – it would help me target a whole lot of Kindle customers with some free publicity… and that’s the only kind of publicity I can afford.

The Room - a tale of murder in the social networking age

 

Available free for all formats from Smashwords

Also available (but not yet free) from Amazon US and Amazon UK

 

 

He had two problems: a broken leg and terminal boredom.

 

The long days and nights alone in his flat after an accident lead an incapactitated young student to renounce his aversion to the internet and take his first tentative steps into the world wide web.

 

Before long, he finds himself entering a new kind of social network: an online self-help community called simply 'The Room'. The experience of eavesdropping on the lives of others quickly becomes addictive, and the members of The Room seem welcoming enough.

 

But then something changes: a man called Bryan confesses to a murder. It could be a fantasy, or a sick joke, but it's not. And the terror doesn't stay online for long...

 

~

THE ROOM is a tale of murder in the age of social networking. A dark psychological thriller of curiosity and killing that has been called a Rear Window for the Facebook generation.

Also includes as a bonus feature the first chapter of Gavin Bell's full-length thriller: Halfway to Hell.

Short story length: 4000 words approx.

 

THE ROOM is also available as part of the story collection THE MISFORTUNE TELLER: 3 STORIES OF CRIME

Weekend promo

One Shot is free to download for Kindle from Thursday 23 August to Monday 27 August. This is one of my ‘singles’ – bundles of three short stories with some sample chapters of Halfway to Hell.

The idea is, if you get three stories for free and enjoy them, you might go ahead and buy the novel. If nothing else, it’s an opportunity to reach more people with my stuff.

I’ve experimented with free promotions before with some success (although it doesn’t seem to be as good a marketing tool as it was, since Amazon changed its ranking algorithm), but this is the first time I’ve used the full 5-day allowance of free days for a book, so I’m hoping to get this on a lot of Kindles this weekend.

So if you’re looking for a quick read and you like crime stories, give this a go – you’ve nothing to lose. And remember – I’m always grateful for a nice review.

 

 

Get One Shot from:

Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

In THE LUCKIEST CORPSE IN THE RIVER, a body is dragged from the River Clyde at high noon. Reporter Jack Wood is on the scene, and he knows it’s nothing out of the ordinary. But then a potential sidebar turns into a dead-cert page one, because the dead man is carrying a winning lottery ticket…

In ONE SHOT, Faith Badder needs to catch a vicious killer. To do so, she has to follow in the footsteps of his latest victim. It’s a one-shot deal, and the stakes are higher than she knows.

And finally, Dr Jeff Cairngorm is a single father with a dark secret in his past. A quiet evening in a new home explodes into horror as AUDREY returns to her family.

The best things in death are free

Matt Hilton's collection of tough-guy (and gal) thrillers Action: Pulse Pounding Tales Volume 1 is going to be free on Amazon for the next two days (Wednesday and Thursday).

Get Action from

Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Action is a fantastic collection of 37 fast-paced and violent hardboiled stories, including contributions from Hilton himself and some other top names including Stephen Leather of Spider Sheperd fame. There's also a story from yours truly.

Grab a bargain - if you like thrillers, you're guaranteed to find something you'll love within these blood-soaked pages.

Giving it away for free... does it pay?

As I’ve probably mentioned before, Amazon’s KDP Select program (under which you have to make your book exclusive to Amazon for 90 days) gives you the option to make your book free for 5 of those 90 days. I thought it was worth a try. After all, an electronic copy of the book costs me nothing, and if someone reads it for free and then writes a positive review or tells a friend about the book, it could help to generate some paid sales.

Having spent some time on the Kindle forums, some indie authors seem to get very uptight about the notion of giving their book away for free: “I sweated blood over my masterpiece, I’ll be damned if anyone is going to read it without paying me for the privilege.”

I think that attitude is a) monumentally egotistical, and b) bad business.

I’m a new author, so nobody knows who I am. Therefore, my first priority isn’t to make sure everyone who wants to read so much of a chapter of my glowing prose pays me my $3.99, it’s to get as many people as I possibly can to read it. If they like it, they tell people and that’s what will get my name around a bit.

This isn’t a new business model, of course – how do people think reviews of traditionally published books get into newspapers? The journalists get free copies, they read them, and hopefully they have something nice to say about them. If you’re not prepared to let anyone see your work, to try before they buy, then why would you ever expect anyone to pay for it?

So yes, I thought a free promotion would be good for business, particularly as it costs me nothing. (I’ve actually seen someone suggest that 600 free books downloaded equates to 600 lost sales. If you genuinely believe this, you must either be criminally insane, or work for the PR department of a major film studio or record company… not that the two are mutually exclusive.)

Anyway, what I didn’t factor in was the indirect benefit: increased visibility. If enough people ‘buy’ your book when it’s free, it rises up the rankings, which means it shows up on more searches and gets cross-promotion through “customers who bought this also bought this…”

I put Halfway to Hell on promotion for two days last Friday and Saturday. It started doing really well in the free book rankings. It was doing so well that I decided to extend it by another day. By Sunday night, it was number 6 on the top 100 free books for Kindle, and number 3 in thrillers. By the time the promotion finished, I’d had over 3,000 downloads in the UK alone.

The sales bump I got from the increased visibility was unprecedented – from selling 17 copies in March, and only 1 so far in April, I sold around 50 copies on the Monday alone. I picked up a glowing 5-star review from someone who’d downloaded the book free on Sunday evening and finished it late on Monday. Sales have stayed steady, and I’m up to 134 paid copies of Halfway to Hell sold since Monday. It’s in the top 50 paid thrillers in the Kindle store, and number 345 among all books for Kindle.

I know this is probably a temporary bump (although I hope that some of those 134 readers will like the book enough to recommend it to others), and that the numbers aren’t exactly big time, even though they’re a huge jump for me. But still – the royalties I’ve generated since Monday total well over £200 (or around $350).

I’m not quitting the day job just yet, but that’s enough to pay a chunk of the mortgage. And just as importantly, people are reading my book. So yeah, free seems to be working for me.  

One Shot

One Shot, my collection of three crime stories is available for Kindle free all day today.

Get it from Amazon US or Amazon UK.

If you like it, I'd really appreciate a review. You could also check out some of my other books, including Halfway to Hell, of course.

ONE SHOT

Three short stories of crime and obsession.

In THE LUCKIEST CORPSE IN THE RIVER, a body is dragged from the River Clyde at high noon. Reporter Jack Wood is on the scene, and he knows it’s nothing out of the ordinary. But then a potential sidebar turns into a dead-cert page one, because the dead man is carrying a winning lottery ticket…

In ONE SHOT, Faith Badder needs to catch a vicious killer. To do so, she has to follow in the footsteps of his latest victim. It’s a one-shot deal, and the stakes are higher than she knows….

And finally, Dr Jeff Cairngorm is a single father with a dark secret in his past. A quiet evening in a new home explodes into horror as AUDREY returns to her family…

* * *

Three stories of mystery and suspense in one great package. This trio of dark thrillers draws on influences as diverse as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Stephen King and Alfred Hitchcock.

This collection also includes an exclusive free sample of HALFWAY TO HELL - Gavin Bell's full-length thriller novel.

The Misfortune Teller

All day today, my short story collection The Misfortune Teller is available free from Amazon.

Get it from Amazon US (up until midnight Pacific Standard Time) or Amazon UK (up until 7am Sunday).

Three short stories of crime and suspense.

In THE ROOM, an incapacitated student gets more than he bargained for when curiosity leads him to join an online self help community. At first the members of The Room welcome him with open arms, but things take a turn for the deadly when one of them confesses to a murder...

In IT'S NOT ME, IT'S YOU, an encounter with a mysterious stranger in an all-night cafe changes a young woman's life forever.

And in THE MISFORTUNE TELLER, Miller is a private detective with an unusual talent. One that just might help him crack his latest case...