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Free Books on Amazon
Free Books and Amazon
I started a page on this blog called Free Books and, needless to say, it is very popular, receiving well over three hundred views a day. ‘Free’ is an extremely powerful word, so that is not surprising in itself. What does surprise many people is Amazon’s attitude towards free books.
In fact, free books on Amazon are frowned upon by the giant on–line retailer, and what many bloggers don’t know is that they can lose their monthly earnings if their ratio of free book give-aways to sold books is too high, and they can lose their account if it happens too often.
A blogger must consistently sell more books than he or she gives away or face the consequences.
I recently started a free book page, as I said above, but I was concerned about how far I could go, and I now realise that that is not far, however, there is a way around it, which I will explain below to those who can stick with me.
There is an option to authors publishing their books on Kindle to give them the exclusive publishing rights to your ebook and enroll it in Kindle Select.
Readers pay a monthly fee for membership to Kindle Select, and that confers upon them the right to read books for free – or at least those books that authors have put into Kindle Select.
Therefore, a blogger can offer free books on Amazon on his website, if the books are in Kindle Select, but they will only be free to Kindle Select subscribers.
Right now, you may be thinking that this is another spiral downwards in the earnings of blog- and website-owners, but there is one salvation.
If the free books that you are offering/promoting are interesting enough to make non-Kindle Select subscribers want to join up, Amazon is willing to pay the blogger $3 for giving away a free one-month trial subscription to Kindle Select.
This makes the whole process of selling books on–line even more convoluted, of course, but it is the only way that I have figured out of making money out of the powerful word ‘free’ in the context of free books on Amazon and not running foul of their rules.
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All the best,
Owen
Podcast: Free Books on Amazon
