

Promoting books with free copies: On Kindle, Best Sellers Don’t Need to Sell - jcdreads
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/books/23kindle.html

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patio11
I think the Kindle gives authors a passel of excellent opportunities to bring
their business practices kicking and screaming into the 20th century:

1) Amazon offers free samples of most books, where you can get hooked on a
chapter and on the last page it has a call to action like: "Like this?
(linky)Buy the book(/link)" It is one or two clicks (can't recall) until money
has exchanged hands and the book is winding its way down the tubes to your
device. This implementation is genius and they need to do more: for example,
EVERY sci-fi/fantasy book needs to have, on the last page, "The epic tale of
heroism, sensuality, and gratuitous buttkicking continues in (linky)Librarian
Unchained(/linky)!"

2) Every author should have a blog. Every author should have an email list.
You should be using both of these to sell or give away things to your fans.
("Hiya guys! Happy Valentine's Day! Since you've been so good to me, I'm
giving you a little treat: a free sneak peak at my next novel, and one
invitation that you can send to a very special someone.") It is absolutely
insane that I can spend literally hundreds to thousands of dollars on books
from one author or publisher and yet nobody at any point tries to capture my
details to sell me more of the stuff that _I clearly want to buy_.

3) Apparently the book industry thinks word of mouth drives most book
purchases. First, that is probably malarky, an old wives' tail which has no
basis in empirical fact. The majority of books are probably sold due to being
the event books which receive heavy promotion, go to the top of the lists, and
can be picked up or clicked on without being searched for. (The Kindle --
wonderful device that it is -- SUCKS for searching for books, except by going
to the genre stacks and sorting by sales. It is like it was designed by the
same guy who did the App Store.)

Instead of using unscientific malarky, they should start actually TRACKING to
see who is buying books and why. People will happily tell you this if you give
them a reason to do it: for example, the author who they consider a close
person in their lives just asks them to, or they're offered a freebie for
their time. (Amazon is in a much better position to do this than either
authors or publishers. If one player in the market is structurally guaranteed
to be the only one with accurate analytics, I think I can pick the winner
already.)

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smanek
hmm, this brings up the interesting idea of A/B testing literature ...

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patio11
At the very least they could test covers (cost: a few hundred per book,
probably drive more sales than any other single item on the page because you
totally can judge a book by its cover), test the book description text, test
the highlighted reviews, etc etc.

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mrkurt
I can confirm that this is evil like crack. I've downloaded the first (free)
book of 2 different series' and ended up purchasing the rest of the books in
each as a result. They gave me two and I bought 5 more.

Even better, they were both by authors that I haven't read before.

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jcdreads
Somewhere, Cory Doctorow dances a little jig.

