Freebies and Promotion: A Few Thoughts

So our recent experiments with Amazon Kindle's free promo service has come to an end - wherein we offered most of our Kindle novels and comic books for free for a limited time to see what kind of effect it would have on sales.

Boy, were we overwhelmed! - shifting over 700 copies in only a few days, and also securing our first ever 'sales' in foreign territories. In fact, we reached out to all of the Amazon European sister sites: .de, .es, .it and even .fr all accounted for a significant number, though it's fair to say that they were mostly our comic books, rather than the prose works - graphic works will always cross cultural boundaries better than the purely written word, although quite what they may make of the peculiarly British humour of Arf and Mo is anyone's guess...

It's been an interesting time, in which we saw our books briefly chart very high on the Amazon Free Kindle lists, with our comic books both reaching the top spots in all their categories. Seeing our books at the No. 1 ranking was quite a buzz. And as a 'loss leader', our free offer for Maranatha has already sparked some interest in the pay-for prequel, Venus in Saturn. It's also made Chaz think about the idea of producing something to be offered permanently for free on the Kindle store - perhaps a collection of shorter works, or a novella of some sort (he does, after all, have a good many ideas of all sorts floating around the place).

In short, it's been a fascinating experiment, and opens up a very interesting future for FWB and its products. You may recall a post on this very blog not all that long ago where Chaz basically discounted the whole idea of the Kindle book reader as having any real impact on the publishing world any time soon - well, he's more than happy to revise that view now, seeing how times have well and truly changed!

No doubt we'll continue to pick up the long-term effects of this promotional period for some time to come. Interesting times, as they say.