For the last five years, the conventional wisdom among most indie writers has been to write short books in sequential series and make the first book permanently free. It’s a strategy that works, to a certain extent. It’s what got me from making pizza money on my book sales to\u00a0making a humble living at this gig. However, I’m starting to question that wisdom.<\/p>\n
I have two books available for free this month:\u00a0Genesis Earth<\/a><\/strong> and\u00a0Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I)<\/a>.<\/strong>\u00a0Genesis Earth<\/strong> was my first\u00a0indie published novel, a “standalone with series potential” (specifically, a trilogy) written according to the conventional wisdom for breaking into traditional publishing.\u00a0Outworlder<\/strong> is a very different book: the first in an eight-book novella series, strong enough to stand alone but short enough to leave the reader wanting more. And for several years, it was perma-free.<\/p>\n Outworlder\u00a0<\/strong>was the first\u00a0of my books to make it big. It’s gotten tens of thousands of free downloads and driven thousands of sales (I don’t have the exact numbers because I haven’t yet collated\u00a0all of my sales reports from the past five years, but that’s something I plan to do). It was largely on\u00a0the success of\u00a0Outworlder<\/strong> and the\u00a0Star Wanderers<\/strong> series that I\u00a0built my early career.<\/p>\n But over time, downloads\u00a0of\u00a0Outworlder<\/strong> slowed to a bare trickle, and sales did as well. I could give it a short-term boost by running a few strategically placed ads, but it would always fall back down to a baseline that was simply unacceptable.<\/p>\n Also, when you have a book that’s permanently free, it tends to accumulate a lot of negative reviews. It’s strange, but some people seem to feel more entitled to XYZ when they get it for free, as opposed to paying for it. Or maybe\u00a0these are the people who try to go through life without actually paying for anything? Who hoard everything, even the stuff that\u00a0they hate, so long as they can get it for free? I don’t know.<\/p>\n Certainly, that’s not true of everyone who reads free books. But when you have a perma-free book, it tends to accumulate more of the barely-coherent “dis buk sux” kinds of reviews from people who probably weren’t in the target audience to begin with. And over time, that tends to weigh the book’s overall rating down, which unfortunately can be a turn-off for people who\u00a0are<\/em> in the book’s audience.<\/p>\n Contrast that with\u00a0Genesis Earth.<\/strong> I launched it at full price with a blog tour (which I put together myself, among\u00a0writer friends whom I knew personally and who had readers who would probably enjoy the book). It sold about a hundred copies in the first ninety days, then slowed to a very low trickle\u2014maybe one or two sales each\u00a0month, if that. Things\u00a0continued like this\u00a0for several years.<\/p>\n Then, back in December, I made it free for one month. Downloads immediately shot up, and continued strong throughout the entire month. Even without any advertising, I was still getting maybe 50 downloads per day on Amazon, plus a constant trickle on the other platforms. For the next couple of months, sales of all my other books grew as well<\/p>\n For\u00a0April, I decided to make it free again, just to see if I could duplicate that kind of success. I haven’t done any paid advertising for it, but I have submitted it to various sites and newsletters that\u00a0will promote free books. The result? Thousands of downloads, with a baseline rate of more than a hundred downloads per day.<\/p>\n Genesis Earth<\/strong> has never been perma-free, but every time I set it free for a limited time, it’s like I’ve released the pent-up flood waters. In contrast,\u00a0Outworlder<\/strong> struggles to get any downloads at all, even when it’s free for only a limited time.<\/p>\n Part of this may have to do with the reviews.\u00a0Genesis Earth<\/strong> has a much better overall book rating, simply because most of the people who read\u00a0it over the years were the ones willing to pay full price. This also means that the book has grown into its own niche organically, since the people who have bought\u00a0Genesis Earth<\/strong> also tend to buy other books similar to it. Retailers like Amazon take note of this, and tend to associate these books with each other in things like also-bought recommendations.<\/p>\n This is all just speculation, but\u00a0when all of this comes together, it seems to result\u00a0not only in a higher download rate when the book is free, but more downloads from people who are in the book’s targeted audience.<\/p>\n The mos fascinating result of this is that when the book goes back to full price, sales get a small but long-lasting boost. I’ve seen this with\u00a0Bringing Stella Home<\/a>,<\/strong> which was free in March. It’s not a huge boost\u2014maybe only five or six books a month\u2014but it boosts all of the other books in the series as well, and lasts for a couple of months. It’s not just Amazon where this is happening, either\u2014in fact, it may be boosting sales on the non-Amazon platforms even more.<\/p>\n Bringing Stella Home<\/strong> is different, though, because it’s a full-length novel (about 110k words, or +300 pages) in a series that can be read out of order just fine. In other words, more of the “stand-alone with series potential” that was the convential wisdom in the old tradpub world. Like\u00a0Genesis Earth,<\/strong> it has never been perma-free.<\/p>\n So what’s the takeaway?<\/p>\n That maybe the convential wisdom among indies is all wrong. That perma-free actually taints books\u00a0and makes it harder for them to stick in the rankings, or to grow into their natural audience.\u00a0That longer stand-alone books with recurring characters set in the same universe may be better for gaining long-term traction than shorter, more episodic books. Also, that the more books you give away for free\u2014not just first in series\u2014the better that\u00a0all\u00a0<\/em>of your books will sell.<\/p>\n My experience is purely anecdotal, and there’s a lot more analysis\u00a0I need to do before I can say anything for sure. From what I can tell, though, it seems that the best strategy is to write longer, fuller books that satisfy more than they entice, and to use\u00a0free as a marketing strategy\u00a0for only a limited time.<\/p>\n In other words, the collective wisdom of KBoards is completely off the mark, and Kris Rusch (who regularly gets vilified on KBoards) actually knows what she’s talking about most of the time.<\/p>\n Like I said, this is all anecdotal and more analysis is required. But I’m very curious now to make some of my non- first-in-series books free for a month, just to see if it has a similar boost. With\u00a0Bringing Stella Home,<\/strong> for example, a lot of readers seem to be jumping over books 2 and 3 to read\u00a0Heart of the Nebula,<\/strong> the direct sequel (but book 4 in the Gaia Nova<\/strong>\u00a0series order). It would be very interesting to see if\u00a0Desert Stars<\/strong> has an awesome free run as well, resulting in more sales after it reverts back to full price.<\/p>\n Lots of interesting stuff to consider. It’s definitely going to inform my writing and marketing efforts in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the last five years, the conventional wisdom among most indie writers has been to write short books in sequential series and make the first book permanently free. It’s a strategy that works, to a certain extent. It’s what got me from making pizza money on my book sales to\u00a0making a humble living at this… Continue reading Thoughts on series and perma-free<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[68,44,32,934,409,460,857],"tags":[89,577,529,731,530,861,757,1046,599],"class_list":["post-10499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bsh","category-ds","category-ge","category-genesis-earth-trilogy","category-gaia-nova","category-hn","category-sw","tag-career-decisions","tag-ebook-revolution","tag-indie-publishing","tag-kindle-boards","tag-kris-rusch","tag-perma-free","tag-series","tag-series-vs-stand-alones","tag-thoughts-reflections","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2Jl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10499"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10502,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10499\/revisions\/10502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}