To make Maid for Love free I changed the price to free on Apple and Kobo and then reported it to Amazon, which matched the low price a few days later. To get the book offered for free on B&N, I distributed it as a freebie via Smashwords. It took a couple of days to show up on the retail site.
Prior to the free offering, the McCarthys were already my most popular books, selling strongly every month. After two and a half months of offering Maid for Love for free, they are even more popular. Maid for Love was the no. 1 free book for all of Kindle for more than a week in late June and remains today at no. 97 in the Kindle free top 100 and at no. 27 for free contemporary romance. All five of the other McCarthy books spent time in the overall Kindle Top 100 in June and July and all of them remain in the contemporary romance Top 100 today.
Here's a breakdown of the numbers. These numbers are for Amazon ONLY. More below on the results on the other platforms. To offer a benchmark of an average month before the free offering, the numbers for the series in May were:
Maid for Love: 2,018
Fool for Love: 1,464
Ready for Love: 1,137
Falling for Love: 1,403
Hoping for Love: 1,330
Maid for Love went on sale as a freebie around June 15 and remains free today. See the results below for AMAZON ONLY for June, July and August:
June
Maid for Love Free: 178,361
Fool for Love: 15,303
Ready for Love: 8,941
Falling for Love: 7,818
Hoping for Love: 7,043
Season for Love (released June 5): 11,599
July
Maid for Love Free: 98,669
Fool for Love: 28,874
Ready for Love: 16,463
Falling for Love: 15,623
Hoping for Love: 14,945
Season for Love: 15,531
August
Maid for Love FREE: 54,840
Fool for Love: 12,176
Ready for Love: 9,312
Falling for Love: 9,227
Hoping for Love: 9,189
Season for Love: 9,434
Totals for June 15 – Aug. 31:
Maid for Love Free: 331,870
Fool for Love: 56,353
Ready for Love: 34,716
Falling for Love: 32,668
Hoping for Love: 31,117
Season for Love: 36,564
Total PAID SALES: 191,418
Observations:
Before I listed Maid for Love for free, I said I'd be happy with 10 percent of the total free downloads in paid sales, so I was extremely pleased with these results (to say the least!).
One of the more interesting aspects of this promotion was how quickly Season for Love, released on June 5, racked up almost 37,000 sales. To contrast, when book 5, Hoping for Love, was released in early March, it sold roughly 10,000 copies in its first two months.
I have debated whether to leave Maid for Love free going forward and have decided to make it a permanent freebie--for now anyway. I figure why not give readers a sample of my work for free and then they can decide if they want to read more.
The sales of my other books have grown as well. The rankings for my Fatal Series have been lower than ever since Maid for Love was free, and the sales of my Treading Water Series have been stronger than usual as have my single titles. I'm hearing from a LOT of readers who tell me they got Maid for Love for free and then went on to read all my other books.
Clearly the fact that Maid for Love was book 1 in a series helped to fuel sales. Another interesting thing to keep in mind about freebies is that they can be the gift that keeps on giving for many months. When you figure how many free books are offered, readers download them in batches and then get to them over a period of weeks and months.
As always with publishing, it goes back to the book. Sure, the first book is free, but readers have really connected with this series and that has helped to fuel sales. I'm looking forward to seeing how book 7, Longing for Love, does when it's released later this month.
Another interesting side effect of the freebie is the explosion in reader mail, Facebook and Twitter followers, subscribers to my mailing list and the members in the McCarthy Series Reader Group on Facebook, which has grown by more than 1,000 members in the last two months.
Another interesting side effect of the freebie is the explosion in reader mail, Facebook and Twitter followers, subscribers to my mailing list and the members in the McCarthy Series Reader Group on Facebook, which has grown by more than 1,000 members in the last two months.
Other Platforms
BN: I didn't see any bump at all from the free offering. I don't think BN does much to promote freebies, and they don't make it easy for self-publishers to list their books for free. Robust sales is all about retailer promotion.
Kobo: Kobo makes it very easy for self-publishers to offer their books for free, but don't do much to promote them—yet. I expect this to get better as Writing Life takes hold. If you look on Kobo's free site for Romance, you find books like Romeo & Juliet, rather than current offerings. I know they're working on making that area more robust. I saw a small bump in sales since June, but nothing to write home about.
Apple: Very robust uptick in sales. Like Kobo, Apple makes it easy for self-publishers to offer our books for free, and like Amazon, Apple does a great job of promoting freebies. My sales have quadrupled on Apple during the promotional period.
Questions? Comments? Bring it on! Hope you find this information helpful. As always, I'm happy to answer any questions you may wish to ask offline at marie@marieforce.com.
Congratulations! Those are some awesome numbers. Well deserved. Hope it keeps up. I'm trying to make my first free on Amazon, but it seems like they're making it more and more difficult to price-match. Hope it works soon as I'm releasing the third book in the series in October, 4th in December.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing these astonishing numbers!
Congratulations, Marie! And this is fantastic information--thank you for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this, Marie, and congrats on your success. I decided to make a prequel to my series free. Still waiting for Kobo to finish processing and Smashwords to ship to Apple so I can get Amazon to price match (it is .99 right now).
ReplyDeleteSo far, the results have been positive and I hope with the book #2, full length like the 1st, out later this week that it will continue. :)
Congrats again, Marie! :)
Thanks ladies! I was pleased with how it's done so far!
ReplyDeleteCongrats, Marie. Thanks for sharing, as it pretty much is confirmation that I'm on the right tack with Love's Portrait. My numbers aren't as high as yours, but I've seen a significant increase in sales on the one book I have out. Working on getting the next book out as quickly as I can. I've a convert.
ReplyDeleteWow, super interesting! Thanks for sharing the info!!
ReplyDeleteCool info! And congrats.
ReplyDeleteWhat other marketing are you doing?
Jen,
ReplyDeleteJust the usual stuff on Facebook and Twitter, blog, website. I've found the absolute best way to promote my books is to write more books.
That's stunning figures, Marie. Free still sells! I'm with you, leave the book for free permanently. It'll continue to draw in new readers.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Tina! I appreciate your input on the plan to leave it free indefinitely!
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting that, Marie! I've decided to leave STOLEN FURY free indefinitely as well because I've seen a big boost in sales from the free promo I did in late July and August. Hoping it continues!
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your experience. It helps so much to learn about this new side of publishing. And wow! Congrats on all the sales!
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your results, Marie, and congrats on your success! Those are some fabulous numbers. Good to hear that freebies can still work magic, at least at Amazon & Apple. I agree about Kobo and B&N -- they have a lot of work to do if they want to seriously compete with the major players. Right now, their websites make browsing and impulse buying nearly impossible.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing those amazing numbers, Marie. I'd say free worked! Was that the first time you experimented with free?
ReplyDeleteHi Laurie,
ReplyDeleteNo, not the first time. I had great results back in Feb. 2011 when a publisher offered one of my books for free for a week. That had the interesting side effect of launching my self-pub career. Prior to that freebie, my two self-pubs had been languishing a bit. They really took off after that and each of my new books has come out stronger than the last. I also had a moderately successful early run with KDP Select with True North last Christmas, but now that the books don't sell especially well after the freebie, I'm not as enamored with that program. Finally, my free offering of Georgia on My Mind over Mother's Day weekend this year was very successful. I posted some of those numbers in my June post here about freebies. Nothing has come close to the numbers Maid for Love has posted, though, which works out well as it's book one of a soon-to-be seven-book series.
Interesting info. Did you get a lot of reviews? How much do you think they played in this?
ReplyDeleteSandra,
ReplyDeleteI got quite a few new--and mostly positive--reviews from the freebie, but I already had a lot of good reviews for this series before the freebie. I think it helps when readers see more than four stars for all the books. It certainly doesn't HURT. :-)