How Free Content Can Boost Book Sales

To sell more books, authors and publishers need to actively manage how their books are discovered, including which excerpts potential buyers can read for free.

“Every author writes different kinds of books and has different audiences, but your audience always wants value,” says Rob Eagar, president of WildFire Marketing. Fiction readers are looking for emotion and stories that inspire, while non-fiction readers want to learn new information or how to overcome a challenge.

So, as Rob advised at Digital Book World’s recent Discoverability and Marketing conference, when doling out free content, don’t just settle for the first chapter. Instead, answer the reader’s age-old question: What’s in it for me?

Another golden nugget of advice from DBWDM:

Jon Fine, Amazon’s director of Author and Publisher Relationships, says authors with books on Amazon should upload (onto Amazon) a PDF of their manuscripts. That way, when someone is looking for a particular topic, not only the book’s title but every word of the book will be searched, making it much easier to discover.

The discoverability message was also loud and clear throughout Digital Book World 2013: we need to know as much as we can about the brave, new world of metadata if we want to successfully sell books.