Free On Amazon! And No, This Is Not A Self-Promo Post.
Yesterday I took one of my Sherlock For Kids titles out of KDP and uploaded to Amazon by another route and listed the price at $0.00.
Today here it is on Amazon at $0.00 with the immortal words “This price was set by the publisher.”
- No exclusivity. It’s still on Apple, Kobo, etc.
- No Select five days free every ninety days. This is free for just as long as I want it to be.
- No going free on other retailers and just hoping Amazon will price-match, or getting friends to tell Amazon there’s a better price elsewhere. In fact it’s still at 0.99 on several retailers, but free on Amazon.
How? By uploading my title to StreetLib, the Italian aggregator (don’t panic, the site is in English!) that in many ways continues to lead the aggregator pack.
StreetLib’s Anne-Catherine de Fombelle has said this is a six month trial and that she hopes indie authors will use this option wisely. I’m sure we (mostly) will.
Free can be a great tool in our indie tool kit, but as above, indie authors have never had the option to list free on Amazon except a) by going exclusive and being able to list free for five days in Select, or b) going free on another retailer and hoping Amazon will price-match.
Now we have the option to list free on Amazon for as long or as short a time as we like, subject of course to either StreetLib and Amazon not changing the rules down the road.
As part of a multi-book and growing series I hope this title will now find lots of new eyeballs and lots of buys of the rest of the series, both on Amazon and on other retailers.
My thanks to StreetLib for making this option available and working so efficiently.
For those who haven’t used StreetLib before, it has some of the best distribution available from any pay-as-you-sell aggregator, and lots more to commend it too.
There are some downsides – not least the clunky interface – but the StreetLib team are working on that and to bring many new features to StreetLib this year.
But the free-on-Amazon option has to be the best thing they’ve come up with to date.
Do pop along to StreetLib (LINK) and at least check out what they offer. Access to Google Play, for example, and the best Italian and Latin American distribution of any English-language aggregator.
This post first appeared in The International Indie Author Facebook Group (LINK) on 16 March 2016.
Looking at the bigger picture.
Mark Williams - The International Indie Author 
Reblogged this on Siobhan Daiko and commented:
This might well be useful…