Making Your Book Permanently Free on Amazon Kindle! by Ben Jackson

Making Your Book Permanently Free on Amazon Kindle!

How I made one of my books permanently free on Amazon Kindle!

This is how I moved away from Kindle Unlimited and made my book The Day My Fart Followed Me To The Dentist permanently free on Amazon. It might not be for everyone. Ultimately, what you choose is going to be up to you, but remember Amazon isn’t always the home of Indie Authors that many people it is. 

So, Kindle Unlimited lets people read your book, and you get approximately .02 cents per page they read. If you have a 600-page book and they read every page, you could get as much as $12. Awesome! If they pick it up and don’t like it and end up reading only 50 pages, or less, you might get a $1. Sometimes it works out in your favor, other times it doesn’t.

Amazon calculates how much you get based on the amount in the Kindle Unlimited pool. The amount varies depends on a percentage of how many people subscribe to Kindle Unlimited and how many authors are in the pool. The biggest advantage to being in Kindle Unlimited is the five free days which you get every 90-days. This allows you to promote your book and expose it to new people. Being in Kindle Unlimited also allows you to create giveaways and competitions, and lets you use Amazon advertising programs. It all sounds good, but what are the drawbacks?

When you agree to take part in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, you can’t list your eBook through any other distributors. That cuts down your audience quite a bit. You’re also limited to those five free days they give you. It exposes you to potential new readers, but this has a drawback too. Sometimes people grab your book just because they can, not because they’re really interested in reading it. This can lead to some terrible reviews from people that wouldn’t have paid for your book any other time but grabbed it because it was free.

Most of the books I write now are children’s books, approximately thirty pages. That means that I get about .60 cents if someone reads them cover to cover. It also means that I need five or six people to read my books to make up for one sale and can’t sell them anywhere else. So, I decided to take them out of Kindle Unlimited and list them elsewhere. This gave me the opportunity to list them on Smashwords and make one of them permanently free.

Once I listed one of my books on Smashwords, I chose to make it free. I then left it for about thirty days until Smashwords listed it on iBooks as free, and Kobo, etc. Now my book is free everywhere, except Amazon, and that’s where they have to step up and price match it or have the competition selling it for nothing. You can get Amazon to price match your book by emailing them directly with the links to where it’s free, or hit the little button where it says, ‘have you seen this title cheaper?’ Now you have a permanently free book on Amazon! You can promote it or just leave it as free or use it to promote the other books you sell. My free book is part of the ‘Little Fart Series.’ Now I have one of the books in the series free as a permanent advertisement for the other books in the series.

This is a great strategy if you start with book one in the series. Make book one permanently free, make the second book .99 cents, and then the rest of the books $2.99 or whatever price you choose. You want to gather new readers in with the free book and then hook them into the series. I hope you enjoyed the article, and if you have used this strategy yourself or would like to, then just comment below to let everyone know how it worked for you!

Written by Ben Jackson

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