This has been a pivotal year in my freelance writing career.
It’s the year I published my first print book. But more importantly, it’s the year I crossed over from mostly working for freelance clients to spending most of my time on this blog and its adjacent community, Freelance Writers Den.
I’m so excited and grateful — I never imagined I would be able to devote so much of my time to doing one of my very favorite things, sharing tips to help other writers earn more money.
It’s still surreal to me that I’ve been able to create this lifestyle, where I’m able to make my living from one of my big passions.
Even my freelance clients are shifting now to places like Freelance Switch, where I write articles that build on what I’m doing here.
I know Thanksgiving has come and gone…but I’m just getting started giving thanks to my incredible reader community.
Actually, the give-backs start today. Here are the details:
Why the next step is free ebooks
I’ve had a project in the works for a while — taking some of my podcasts I’ve done for Freelance Writers Den and turning them into ebooks.
My thought was that these could turn into a new income stream for me. People who didn’t want to commit to an ongoing community membership might purchase one of my ebooks and just get a quick hit of learning.
Then I hosted Danny Iny from Firepole Marketing on a recent call…and he said something that changed my thinking.
He said really, all ebooks should be free. (Lots more on Danny’s story of creating a wildly successful bestselling ebook coming up in a post in a few weeks, so stay tuned).
Why?
- Ebooks all have low prices, anyway. They’re not meaningful money-makers, for the most part. So why not make them free?
- When they’re free, people are more likely to share them.
- They’re also more likely to write rave reviews on Amazon, which helps your ebook rank well, get more attention, make more sales, and get you even more readers for your blog.
- People really appreciate your helping them with tips that cost them nothing, so it builds loyalty.
- Your free ebooks have links to all your paid stuff, so they become lead-generation machines.
Well, that all made a lot of sense to me.
So I decided to go for it. I’m going to do a bunch of free Kindle ebooks.
My Kindle Adventure
Regular readers will recall my shame at how my first ebook was only a PDF and wasn’t available on the Kindle.
I vowed to learn how to publish on the Kindle and start tapping the enormous power of Amazon’s huge traffic and its recommendation machine.
So, I’ve plunged in.
Renegade Writer Linda Formichelli and I did a podcast together recently about how we speed up our writing process so that we can earn more. And we turned it into an ebook, 13 Ways to Get the Writing Done Faster.
Why My Ebook is Only Free for 5 Days
Here’s what I discovered about publishing on the Kindle — while it was fairly easy to learn how to physically create my ebook and get it into their platform, it’s not that easy to make the ebook free!
They want it to be at least 99 cents.
But…if you submit it to Amazon’s Kindle Select program, you can promote it as free for five days each month every 90 days.
The big catch: To get your ebook included in KDP Select, Amazon’s ebook promotional machine, you can’t sell it anywhere else. So it’s not for sale here on my blog, and no, I can’t send you a PDF of it. It’s only on Amazon.
(I gather if you sell it free somewhere else it may cause Amazon to make your ebook free…but not ready to play that game of brinksmanship with them on this one. We’ll try that experiment in the future, likely.)
UPDATE: The freebie offer for 13 Ways to Get the Writing Done Faster has now expired, but lately we’ve priced it at a big $.99. We may change that in future, so if you want it you might want to grab it while it’s so cheap.
If you read it and would be willing to leave a quick review of it on Amazon, we’d super appreciate it.
Enjoy!
