I'm ending all my reader magnet freebies

[alhawke]

I've experimented with a reader magnet for the past two years. First I gave away Beltane Fire. More recently I gave away Samhain Witch. Both books were only available for the newsletter exchange (except a paperback). They were short stories connected with my witch series. I offered the books for free on my website and in various newsletter swaps (many Bookfunnel) in exchange for joining my newsletter.

I can't quantify my results exactly, but I believe that by offering the books for free, results for new members were not much better than joining gift promos. Gift promos offer a book as a prize--they can be any of your books. These are run by various promo companies such as Bookfunnel, AXP, ILVN, Crave Books, etc (the most recent Crave Books promo garnered me 1200 emails for $5 ). These promos usually offer one book as a gift, they don't generally offer free books to everyone. You admittedly get a lot of junk emails and you have to regularly remove subscribers, but I think it builds your list much quicker.

I suppose that's the issue. I can get 1-2 readers from subscribers who loved one of my books (I also offer newsletter subscription at the end of all my books), but I'm not living long enough to see 10 new readers a year growing my writing career.  I just don't think this strategy, or reader magnets, works well. I recognize that these are typically the best subscribers, but the number's still negligible. Yet many writers are doing it, so... 

What do you guys think? I have 5000 readers in my newsletter. I average around 25% open rate. I write in paranormal fantasy/romance.

[LilyBLily]

I think it's better to gain a few thousand new subscribers all at once via a curated contest run by someone else than to hope that five hundred will sign up organically after reading our books or we will get huge sales from a group promo in which we give away free or deeply discounted books to all comers. The companies that offer these shots in the arm try to weed out obvious dead wood, but definitely many people subscribe hoping to win something and then immediately unsubscribe. Our job is to make the ones who might be persuaded to actually by a book want to stay. Laziness will keep many of them from unsubscribing right away, so we have some time to win them over. 

[alhawke]

I think it's better to gain a few thousand new subscribers all at once via a curated contest run by someone else than to hope that five hundred will sign up organically after reading our books or we will get huge sales from a group promo in which we give away free or deeply discounted books to all comers.

That's why I'm making changes. I might offer a different free story in the future, but I don't see enough of a benefit.

It's a "catch 22". You want to make a reader magnet good enough to draw in new readers. It should be your best foot forward. But I've found that if I'm putting my best foot forward, I should be selling that same story.

Still, I'm excited about the change because I'll be selling the story wide with my series.

[Lorri Moulton]

December 27th is the next ZoeBub, so there will be plenty of free ebooks for anyone who wants to 'stuff their Kindle' or any other e-reader. 

I don't know how well free works anymore. Between the big push to make the first in series free with "wide" and all the giveaways, readers have more free ebooks than they can read.

I'm not saying free doesn't work, but there is a lot more competition to get eyes on our books.  And if we want readers to PAY, they still have stacks of free ebooks in their TBR piles.

Hope this next idea works well for you!  I've been trying a few different things...mainly to get readers to READ the ebooks they already have, so they might get interested enough to buy the rest of the series.

[writeway]

I stopped doing my magnet about 2 years ago. I saw no effect it had plus I wanted to go back to having a completely organic list. I stopped doing builders and giveaways (for my list), Round Robins, etc. They ruined my list and I had to drop over 400 Booksweeps people from my list. Booksweeps was horrible. The worst builder ever with untrustworthy and scammy "subscribers." Not all the builders were bad but over time you had more people sign up that didn't seem to support than those who did and that's when I did an overhaul. I love doing freebies otherwise because they've really increased my income but as far as my list, I am no longer doing gimmicks to get subscribers. I want true supporters, not those who join to get a freebie and then unsubscribe or never engage.

[R. C.]

Well, isn’t timing always the thing?

In an experiment to find a new consumer of written prose, I expanded my “permafree/loss-leader/magnet offer” marketing for Q3 and Q4 this year.

This thread, and nearing the end of Q4, caused me to pause and run a few reports to see if my marketing efforts were practical regarding follow-on sales.

Yeah, not so much. 

I have increased traffic to my site, and the SEO scoring is better. Downloads (≈301) of the free offers are up. 

However, there is a persistent bugaboo in today’s retail marketing: Second clicks are death. I contend the success of achieving a second click is well below one percent of consumers of “digital print” media.

A “permafree/magnet offer” to an “unknown audience” is, indeed, a loss with no discernable lead to future sales.

Consequently, I am pondering another option for roll-out in the New Year. A new strategy is needed because there is only one tried and true rule for marketing: If it doesn’t work, try something else. 

R.C.

[idontknowyet]

Here's my take on newsletters from reader magnets.

They take time to actually build into fans. Lots of time.

But that isn't the value of newsletters. It's swaps. Leveraging your newsletter size to swap with other author in your genre is one of the cheapest revenue boosters. With bad editing and terrible covers, I made several hundred dollars a month from swaps alone. I'm revamping my reader magnet which is why i haven't done them in almost a year.

[alhawke]

Consequently, I am pondering another option for roll-out in the New Year. A new strategy is needed because there is only one tried and true rule for marketing: If it doesn’t work, try something else. 

Yes, definitely, new strategies are needed. I think the market is changing fast.

For one thing, I've noticed changes in the promo market--many promo companies are leading to dead websites and going out of business. Or consolidating into mega promos (WrittenWord Media).

I've also noticed that many readers I've gathered from swaps are repeaters. The Indie reader email market seems to be shrinking--or, my particular genre is shrinking. Again, this is my observation. It could be very different for others. I mean, the mystery/thriller market and "purer" romance market (not the fantasy stuff I do) is probably something like 4x larger than my genre. Are there other readers for my books? Sure. But how many readers subscribe to monthly newsletters?

They take time to actually build into fans. Lots of time. But that isn't the value of newsletters. It's swaps. Leveraging your newsletter size to swap with other author in your genre is one of the cheapest revenue boosters.

I agree with both your points. I'm not saying a reader magnet has no value. Just like I don't think permafree is not of value. I'm just questioning if it's value enough for me. Or maybe, I've just done enough for now. I could release one again in the future??

Readers that subscribe to your stuff after a sample story are truly gold, but their numbers tend to be fairly small. I've had better luck with offering a book as a reward in exchange for hundreds of emails and then sifting through the chaff to find the readers who are truly interested. That actually has garnered me far more emails than book magnets for me. Still, I'm keeping my subscribe button at the end of all books and on my website.

[PJ Post]

I think Amazon has trained us all to keep our books artificially cheap, and it's a habit I'm trying to break. I suppose it will take a while to see how it pans out.

I don't think that was Amazon. I think they were shocked by self-publishing's race to the bottom. They gave us a $9.99 cap and every incentive to price high. But the only business concept the early self-publishers knew was how cheap can we go. They trained the readers on 99 cents novels and when that wasn't low enough they bundled multiple books into boxsets for the same price - which brings us to 2024 and our grossly underpriced and undervalued work.

[Bill Hiatt]

I think it was both. Amazon used the royalty structure to encourage a $2.99 minimum and created a $0.99 floor. But Amazon also encouraged the use of free days as a tool. It was successful at first. In fact, some people claimed that was the foundation on which their career was built.

The problem was that authors overused price promotions (not having the same range of options that trads have). Price is one thing that we can control in ways trads can't, so there is a certain logic to it. (We do have overhead, but we don't have employees or huge office buildings in Manhattan.) But, as you say, it trains readers to expect a low price point. And Amazon's pricing  tool, which I think no longer exists, didn't take long to start recommending $2.99 as the appropriate price point.

Remember that Amazon imprints also flood the market with free books to get reviews, and think about the way Amazon manipulates audio prices, generally downward.

Authors did their fair share, but so did Amazon.

[PJ Post]

The recommendations were just reflecting current data, not strategy. The lower self-publishers priced, the lower the recommendations went, until they hit a floor at $2.99. I think that was artificial. The actual mean was probably more like $1.49 or something.

The math and trendlines are pretty unforgiving. We can blame Amazon for lots of stuff, but not this one. We did this to ourselves. And we did it right out of the gate. I was ranting about it in 2012, but by then the 99 cent strategy had already become a mainstay.

As for the current shenanigans, that's why I started the 2024 Career thread.