Share Your Chapter One discussion

I see lots of authors offering their books for free, but I rarely click on them. If I'M not, i'm guessing lots of you aren't either. So, the big question here is: How does one rise above the noise, get noticed and get downloaded? And if we aren't converting visits and likes into sales when our books are free, what hope to we have when they're not free?

Hi Mary, I've had great success with a freebie weekend- I sold well over a thousand books quickly after that, but the catch is to have a support system first.

Step one would be to have a niche, as they would say in general business, but in books, a genre. Then going forces with other authors in your genre. Mine is historical fiction for the first book, going into historical w/ a touch of fantasy in the second. So I made friends with lots of histfic writers and organized them into a promotional group on Facebook. When we have something we want promoted, we mention it in the group and the others broadcast it to their FB friends and tweeps. Then, when I did my freebie weekend all my friends broadcasted it. I gave away 20,000 books in two days and sold steadily ever since.

Historical fiction writers are welcome to contact me by message if they would like to join our promo group. I don't think it would be helpful to other authors, as our fans are histfic fans.

Wow. That's encouraging! I thought it was kind of hopeless, but this is welcome news. Thanks for sharing this very helpful info!

I had a good experience offering a free book on Goodreads, having over 700 readers enter. The winner gave me a very nice review as well.

Hi everyone. This is something I think abt often. Bldg networks with other authors is definitely key. Good luck!

I'm just coming off of a "free kindle" promo week, with a 3-book nonfiction pet behavior series. I offered the "multi-dog" one M-W, the "multi-cat" T-R, and the "cat-dog" behavior book free W-F (today's the last day). Nonfiction probably doesn't sell as well as fiction, but it's priced higher and very niche-oriented as @Mary said. All of my cat and dog followers on Facebook shared. Even if it doesn't sell a boatload of books it does raise these titles in the rankings (now being seen clearly in pet care, behavior, training categories). Time will tell if this increases sales or not. I'm hopeful it will also garner a few positive reviews. The three titles combined were downloaded over 1000 times including in Germany, France, Italy etc. Oh, here's the one that's still free for today: