Getting it Free: Marketing and a Plea

When Drain Me Dry went free a while back in the US I talked about how having a free book on Amazon helps with sales. This is still very true. Will comment about that in just one second.  First off, book 1 of the Deadly Liaisons series is FREE for everyone to try.  You can get it for free in the following places:

Amazon US
Amazon Canada
Amazon Germany
Smashwords (carries Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, and more)

Now, I REALLY wanna get this title listed for free in the UK, but I need your help.  Amazon works with a price matching system. When multiple people report a lower price elsewhere online they will match it on the main page. I'm sure the number of people is very small because I don't have many readers in Canada and it went free there this month. If just a handful of you would go to the Amazon UK page, scroll down to the "tell us about a lower price" link (under the book/file stats) and give them this link right here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/241395 I and all of the gay vampire fans in the United Kingdom would be eternally grateful.  I really would like "Drain Me Dry" to be free there by the time "Bloodlines" goes up for sale in a few weeks.

Now, for the authors/writers reading this page, let me tell you about my experiences with offering Drain Me Dry for free now that I've been doing it for a few months.

I get about a 10% return on all those free stories I give away (20% in Germany--they really like me there).  I give away about 500 copies of Drain Me Dry every month and sell around 50-60 copies of "Addicted to the Bite" and "Club Midnight."  It's totally worth it, given that Drain Me Dry is an 8,000 word short story I wrote last September.

(Indie fantasy author Lindsay Buroker has had great success with this method, btw. Check out her stuff here.)

As a reader I don't want the first four chapters of something--I want an entire, neatly wrapped package.  I feel the author is a kind, generous person and it makes me much more likely to go read more, and spend money on said author. If you're writing a series, I think it definitely helps to make the first book free. Writing a shorter intro story is also a great way to step into a series (while "Drain Me Dry" is a short story, "Addicted to the Bite is a novelette at 12k words and all of the books from "Club Midnight" on will be at least 20k) or even a nice intro to a stand alone novel. A free short which directly ties to a full-length novel would be a great way to pick up readers.

So, free stuff is great.  And UK readers should go whine to Amazon for me. :)