Don't Discount the Freebie

By Chester Campbell

Some of my colleagues here have been discussing the vagaries of book promotion. It is a subject that strikes the center of what we do, write books we hope others will read. Experience has shown that if we don't promote our works, people will not learn about them and, therefore, not buy. One of the sticking points of late is the subject of free books. Should we give some away in hopes of attracting more sales?

Being a midlist (or maybe sub-midlist) author who has never sold a ton of books, I am acutely aware of this problem. Well, I did sell some eighty-plus books at the Kentucky Book Fair several years ago, though I haven't managed to equal that since. At any rate, I decided a year ago that tales my colleagues were telling about freebies sounded like the way to go.

As it turned out, I got in on the tail end of the boom days. The first few I tried on Amazon's KDP Select program (about one a month) did decently well, then toward the end of the year tapered off as more and more writers jumped into the water. As others have noted, things continued to slip during the first half of this year.

When I first read of BookBub, I checked it out and said no thanks at the sight of that $240 price tag. Then I read experiences of people like Jinx Schwartz and Rebecca Dahlke and decided to give it a try. I put my second Greg McKenzie mystery, Designed to Kill, up free for three days the middle of September. It had over 49,000 downloads, far better than anything I'd done before. In the two-plus weeks since it went back to $2.99, I've had more sales than normal, though nothing outstanding. But the other four books in the series have done quite well, bringing total sales of around 400 ebooks.

I should make at least double what I paid BookBub, and my name has gotten out to thousands of new downloaders. Most of them probably aren't readers, but enough have been to make them come back to buy more of the series. Also the number of reviews on Amazon for Designed to Kill has more than doubled to 44, the latest four hours ago with five stars titled "Great read. Page turner."

BookBub doesn't accept every book, but I'll try another in a couple of weeks and see how it goes. My experience tells me don't discount the value of the freebie.

Visit me at ChesterDCambell,com

The Quixotic Phenomena Called a Review

By Chester Campbell

Book reviews are an interesting phenomena. They are so subjective that you have to evaluate them with care and and in many cases take them with the proverbial grain of salt. There has been a flood of posts on various blogs and listserves recently about Amazon's treatment of reviews. And much of it derives from the fake review exposes of late.

Many writers have complained of Amazon's recent practice of taking down reviews from their book pages for various reasons. There is a lot of disagreement about what is taking place. Some say the massive retail site has removed reviews by other authors. Some say it doesn't like reviews put  up by friends of the author.

Happily I haven't noticed any reviews removed from my books except for one, Secret of the Scroll, my first published book and the first in my Greg McKenzie mystery series. However, it's easy to see what they did. The novel was originally published in 2002 by Durban House. I parted with the company after my third book and got my rights back. I also got a large supply of books from their inventory, which I used to keep the books on Amazon and sell at various venues.

I ran out of Secret of the Scroll copies this year and got it printed in a second edition by Night Shadows Press. The  inside of the book is virtually identical, but the cover has several changes, one of which I had wished was there from the start. With nothing but the title and artwork of an ancient scroll on the original cover, many people thought it was a religious book about the Dead Sea Scrolls. The new cover includes copy identifying the story as an international thriller.

The Amazon page contained around eight reviews submitted back in 2002 and 2003. After the new edition was put up, Amazon gained another batch of reviews when I did three free days for the Kindle edition. Recently I found that the reviews for the 2002 edition had been removed. I thought that was a little picky, but I haven't complained.

Back to my original premise about the subjectivity of reviews, I found it quite interesting to read a few recent reviews for the second Greg McKenzie book, Designed to Kill. Several reviews were added after I ran its Kindle edition free. Here are three that appeared one after the other. First came a 3-star review titled "It's OK":

"In a nutshell, I felt like this story was a little predictable. I figured out early on who the bad guy was. I continued to read it though, hoping that I would be surprised in the end. Sadly, I wasn't."

Under that appeared this 1-star review titled "I Didn't Even Finish It":

"It is rare that a book is so bad, that I don't finish it. I have pushed through some terrible books in the past, but this one was an exception. I didn't like anything about this book. I didn't like the characters. I didn't like the story line. I found it boring, and rambling. This was my first and last Greg McKenzie Mystery."

Following that came this 5-star review titled "Killer out there":

"Greg McKenzie retired and living in Nashville with his wife Jill find themselves as amateur sleuths, after their close friends son is found dead from a head wound in Pensacola Florida, the evidence suggest he committed suicide by a gunshot to his head.
Greg and Jill decide to go to Florida to take a look at the evidence as the family believe he was murdered. So the story begins ranging from Nashville Tenn. to Pensacola Flo. This is an interesting book as it teams up a husband and wife who are retired and in their early 60's. A well thought out and plausable plot that will keep you guessing to the end."

You'd have thought they read different books. Fortunately for my ego, the page contains seven 5 stars, including one from Midwest Book Review that ends with:

"A plot that moves along at a rapid clip with plenty of cliffhangers and well-defined characters. Greg McKenzie and his wife Jill are likeable characters who manage to transform retirement into a series of exciting adventures, all the while dealing with aging bodies and minds. A fine second effort!"

Visit me at Mystery Mania.