Set Your Book as “Free” – Permanently

This short tutorial teaches you how to set your existing Amazon books for free without having to rely on their KDP Select program. There are some obvious disadvantages to this tactic, but also great benefits worth mentioning.

When you enroll a book through the KDP Select program, you are only allowed to make your content freely available for a maximum of five days over a 90-day period. Once over, the book’s minimum price has to be sold for at least 99 cents. Depending on the book’s success (downloads and overall user response) we may often wish to keep the book free of charge. But we can’t – not under normal circumstances, at least. Thankfully, you do not need to depend on KDP Select to keep benefiting from those sweet, free downloads.

Why would you want to make a book available for free, anyway? Well, it provides a great way to promote your name and kick-starting a good book series.

Think about this: Often times, your book easily gets hundreds or even thousands of downloads during its free promotional period on KDP Select. During this time, a multitude of users come to know you better as an author, and many of them can become hardcore fans.

Can you imagine the potential of publishing your Amazon book for free forever?

This could potentially bring some serious cash over time. For example, develop a series of short books and publish the very first one for free, while keeping the remaining books at a higher price. Advertise the crap out of such volumes on the front and on the back of that first (free) book.

Advertising them in the middle doesn’t hurt, either — perhaps in the form of a contextual link. Again, imagine the incredible amount of users who could potentially buy all subsequent stories in your book series simply because they couldn’t help but wonder how it all ends.

This also allows you to build a responsive list of loyal fans. You can then ask them to read and review your book to maximize your monthly book earnings over time.

So, can you see where I’m going with this? The idea of giving away your hard work for free can, in fact, be a blessing in disguise. That being said, here is the simple procedure to set your Amazon books as “free” forever.

Set Amazon Book Price as Free:

1-      Publish your existing Amazon book through Smashwords, which distributes it to a wide range of book markets such as B&N, Apple and others.

2-      Set its price to $0.00 – this is a handy option Smashwords gives publishers during the initial publishing process. It is important that you publish your book through this venue because Smashwords is one of the only places that lets you give away a book free of charge. This opportunity is currently unavailable on other platforms.

3-      Go to Amazon and visit your book’s description page, or its sales page. Scroll down and click the option to report a lower price on your book, located right under the Product Details field:

While the last step is optional, sometimes it helps expedite the entire process.

Note: I have heard that Amazon may not always bring the price to $0.00 for all books, but it does seem to work most of the time.

That’s it! Feel free to play with this basic technique and let me know if your fan base ever increases.

Enjoy.

This article was originally published on the Epic Passive Income blog.