Some people decide they want to become an author, others are born authors. For me, the latter rings true. Since I could remember I have been fascinated by the art of story telling. However, getting your content ‘out into the public’ can be a challenge. Within this “Freemium” world, Free Reading Books can be one of your best strategies to get your work in front of eager eyes.
Why Free Reading Books can help you spread your message
People are typically wary of new content. They aren’t convinced that they want to spend on you, no matter how awesome your work may be. That’s why I decided to implement two strategies and am currently testing it to see which one works best.
Within my “Free Reading Books” campaign, I implemented two different strategies that I will explain in a bit more detail below. The goal of this strategy is two fold:
- Get people to start reading my books
- Capture them in an email list
The first part is quite obvious. If people don’t know you are a writer…they will never be able to appreciate your work. And while selling is one of the top goals for writers, newbies need to be flexible in terms of ‘giving away’ some of their work. This helps the reader become familiar with your work and in turn could create a fan. This is why you want to give away some of your work. As mentioned I’ll explain two unique strategies I am currently testing below.
The second aspect of this free reading books strategy comes down to capturing the emails of potential fans. You’ll never just give away your work for free, there has to be some sort of exchange for the work. The best exchange is to capture their emails so you can market to them in the future.
Free Reading Books: Strategy 1 – Segmented Reading
Let’s talk a bit about the first strategy. I’m using one of my earliest published books (While Waiting – The Falling) that doesn’t have a lot of traction as of yet. I published it roughly four years ago and put it on Amazon. Then…I simply forgot about it and continued on with life. Now, after four years of online marketing experience I’m about to re-market this book and before I do so, I’m editing it, changing the cover again and creating a landing page to re-fresh the content. My writing dramatically increased in terms of quality and thus I am beefing up the wording to sound more like I do these days.
Now in terms of my marketing strategy I have taken one story (The book is a compilation of 10 short stories) and am giving it away for free. Within this free story I have embedded a call to action at the end for people to buy the entire book if they choose. The CTA will send them to a landing page that will explain more about the full book and will include a video to help the sales process along. I’m also now expanding it to a bunch of different platforms through Create Space.
To drive in traffic, I’ll be using Facebook videos and adding an advertisement budget. I took a course with Chris Record, a master in Facebook advertising and hopefully this should drive in the traffic. To access the book, a user must first give me his email and then I send them the link to the Free Reading Books download.
Once I have the email captured, I activate an email chain in my auto responder that will continue to deliver value to the reader and convince them to buy the book. I’ll update with a new blog once I have run a few tests to show you how it went.
Free Reading Books: Strategy 2 – Fremium Upgrades
The second strategy I’m implementing is what I call a “Fremium Upgrade“. While this strategy is usually related to software and app marketing, I figured why not give it a shot with my books as well. So, I loaded one of my non-fiction books to my site for free download.
Unlike the first strategy, I am giving away the entire book for free (forever). The catch is that this book is my first draft. I essentially wrote it and published every chapter after I completed it. Then, using social media…I pasted snippets of my book for an entire year. As of now, I have collected 181 emails with this strategy and spent zero dollars on acquisition.
Now, I am busy editing it and creating the Premium Version of the book. Once I have finished the premium version of the book, I’ll be moving on to building the landing pages and the email autoresponder sequences to help push the book. The Free version is broken down per chapter, meaning that if you want to read it…you’ll have to download each individual chapter. Within the Premium version it is all combined into one file, and I will be embedding hyperlinks into the book to give it more value. Finally, for this book I will also create a “Link Glossary” to help the reader quickly find the content they need without having to sift through the book to track down the information.
I already have a fan base with this strategy and I believe that once I start marketing it, I will definitely push some sales. Seeing that the book is on a hot topic: Marijuana, there seems to be a buzz occurring on a global scale. We’ll see how that goes.
Testing and Adjusting with your Free Reading Books strategy
Within this Free Reading Books strategies, I will be continually testing and adjusting the approach to see which one works the best. I’m hopeful that this information will help other new authors to get their books out and in front of eager eyes.
If you want to learn more about book writing, how to market your books and have questions about my free reading books strategy…let me know either on Social Media or you can contact me at JG@jeandregerber.com