Freebies. Let’s talk about freebies.

I mentioned my “reader magnet” in a previous blog. It is called Stories and Poems of Trueterra, which refers to my novel A Vacant Throne. There are stories and poems alluded to in this novel but usually does not present them in their full context. Stories and Poems has these in full, along with additional material written in the spirit of the originals and that I continue to write. When I add new stories or poems, I send off the new version to my email subscribers to remind them that I still exist and hopefully keep them engaged until I have another book to promote.

This is a standard practice in the self-publishing world. Typically, authors send out a newsletter to keep in contact with their subscribers. I prefer to write additional stories.

Another standard practice among self-publishers, particularly on Amazon (Kindle Direct Publishing), is to have a new release available for free for a few days to get things rolling. You can only do this for a few days on Amazon, then the price must return to normal. You cannot publish a free book on Amazon. My reader magnet is published on Draft2Digital and available through Smashwords.

Part two of this scheme of offering the new title for free is to “stack” the offers of promotional sites to help give away your book. Here I will refer to David Gaughran’s excellent blog on promotional sites for explanation.

I spent less than two hundred dollars to have multiple promotional sites to help me give away e-copies of A Vacant Throne. To my delight, during this campaign, there were 1300 + downloads of my book. To my distress, I appeared to have garnered one bad review for my effort and nothing more. I vowed never to do that again.

However, I recently had a “duh” moment. What if I use the promotional sites to give away my free book? On the promotion site, I will present a pitch for Stories and Poems of Trueterra with a line somewhere informing the reader that they will be directed to my opt-in page on Mailerlite. I think that is only fair. I only want people who have some interest in what I am writing. I might get hundreds of subscribers.

Is this a long shot? Yup. But if 9% of them respond in the future, this could be well worth it. I’ll let you know how it turns out in a future blog post.

Also, I will soon be sending out a new version of Stories and Poems to all of you on my email list. My present concern is how the poems’ formatting appears on the various e-readers. Please let me know in the comment box if there are no breaks between stanzas, strange indenting, etc. If you are not receiving Stories and Poems of Trueterra, here is your chance! And don’t worry, you have my promise that our email address is safe with me.

Next month, I might be blogging on the formatting of poems for epubs, depending on what feedback I get. There are problems.