"Free Book Service" Promotion strategy

Caveat: I don't know whether this kind of promotion can be duplicated.

There is a service called "Free Book Service" that charges a fee and guarantees that your free book will get up to 10,000 downloads in a few days. The number of downloads depends on which fee you pay. Since they deal only with free books, the service makes sense to me only for a series in which one of the books is free or for a book that is offered free for a few days. In the latter case, you won't earn royalties, but the ranking bump might be worth it.

I purchased the 10,000 download option for the first of my Stanley Bentworth series. Sure enough, I got well over 10,000 downloads (18,000+ at last count). Sales of the other two books shot up at the same time. The free book took a big ranking bump and was #1 in its category for a while. This brought attention to the other books in the series, which accounted for their increased sales, I think.

This promotion did not affect the sales of any of my other books.

Sales of #2 and #3 continue at a moderate pace now, and I picked up a few reviews too. Royalties from total sales following the promotion now exceed what I paid for the service.

The service took a lot of heat when they announced it on Kindle Boards. It's a long discussion (22 pages) and you can read it if you're interested.

http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,169160.0.html

A lot of authors opposed the service. None of them acutally tried it. Those of us who tried it were among those who didn't oppose it.

The discussion got locked by a moderator when it went too far off-topic and descended into a heated exchange.

Thanks for sharing your success. I agree about then need for a series.

Correction: I got my math wrong. I haven't yet matched the cost with royaltied. It's about 80 bucks short. Sorry.

Three years ago, Mr. Planemaker's Flying Machine was priced matched to zero for several months. The book had 10,000+ downloads. When the book went back to paid, it made steady sales. At that time, quite a number of authors on Kindleboards set the price of their Smashwords books to  zero for Amazon to price match. Some had 40,000+ downloads and made very good sales when the price went back to paid. Then Amazon introduced KDP Select and everyone's sales fell off a cliff and dwindled to almost nothing.

It is much more difficult to make sales now. Your experience doesn't surprise me, Al. Covering marketing costs is difficult even when the promotion produces a significant increase in sales.