RichWriters Book Promotion Article: Giving Away Copies

The power of giving away copies of your book.  Now, a lot of people when they first started writing a book, they really want to make as much money as possible because that's one of their primary reasons that they're even doing it, but when you think long term and you think about building your audience and having not just one book but two or three books, really your primary concern should be in your first book, attracting as many people as possible.  That's why giving away as many books as possible, is really the best way because what happens is when you give your book out, and that really is good, people start talking about it.  So, I found that given the right opportunity, choosing the right people to give away the book, that was a great opportunity for me in order to build my fan base.  It led to thousands of people reading my book and thousands of people buying the book.  The more people to read your book, the more they are going to want to buy the second book and want to buy the third book, which is really what you should be doing while you're promoting your first book.  You should be writing your second and third book, which if I could do it all over again, I would have written Forever My Lady Part 2 and Forever My Lady Part 3, while I was promoting the first book.  It really makes it a very attractive thing to a major publisher if you have huge fan base.  So they really don't care so much if you gave the book away or if you sold the book.  They just want to be a huge fan base because they believe that if you're able to attract that many people on your own, imagine how much better they can do with all their [Inaudible 01:20] and all their money.  So what you really want to do is start collecting all the e-mails and addresses into an excel file of all the people that you ran across.  And every time you met somebody, you want to click their business card not just gave your business card out because you want to start collecting their information and their e-mail addresses and really keeping in touch with them, you know, staying friend with them, you know really have fun and it is really kind of cool to really have thousands of friends all over the world.   Now, a great way to do that, of course, is to give your book away.  Now, a lot of people are worried about, My God I only have a certain budget.  I can't afford to give away books and I told them to stand it because when I first begin, you know Forever My Lady, I really do have a lot of money to give away books, so what I did was I started allowing people to download the book as an e-book.  It was a novel and I would allow them to download the book for free.   Now, publishers pay attention not only to books that are sold but how many books are in circulation even if they're ebooks.  So, when people ask me how many books I've sold or how many books were out there, I let them know that there are 8000 books in circulation at that time when I sold the book to Warner Books.  That was not only the books that were printed and sold but also the books that were downloadable.  So how do you do that?  How do you make an e-book that's downloadable   What you want to do is when you create your manuscript in Microsoft Word, you want to turn it to a PDF file.  That's P as in Paul, D as in dog, F as in Frank.  And it's very simple to do.  You can go through to Adobe.com and do that if you want to pay, but the best way to do it in order to do it for free when you really looking to do with things under budget, is to go to cutepdf.com.  That's cute as if you're so cute PDF dot com, and you can actually download a program that will allow you to turn your Microsoft Word documents into PDF's and it's free.   What's also great about e-book is that they're trackable.  You can keep track of how many people are downloading it.  Why it is great because it gives you really means some strong tracking and statistics to really show the publisher to really prove how many people have been downloading it, how many people have been reading you're book, how many books are in circulation.  You want people to be able to download the book because you want them to e-mail the book to their friends, you know.  You can create contest in a sense for people to spread the word whoever spreads the most word or whoever sends the most e-mails and most copies of your book out are going to be able a prize or something like that or win a lunch with the author or whatever it is that you have that's of value that you're able to give.   Now, you don't need to give away the whole book.  If the book is a novel, then just give away about a chapter or two or really leave the book were there's a hook where they have to know what's going to happen next.   At first, when I started giving away copies of Forever My Lady as an e-book, I gave away the whole entire novel, but in fun it was necessary, I started giving away half the book and then I gave away the first couple of chapters and that was enough.  It was still working just as effectively because I would always leave them in a hook – a chapter that would really make them want to know what's going to happen next.   And one of the great thing about e-books is you can actually advertise your book.  You can let them know where they can buy the book, you know the printable copies, which means either online or maybe if you get the book available in bookstores, or you can get a sponsor to put their logo on the back and start to do a barter or trade.  Maybe they have a huge fan base in their website, and you will tell them that you will advertise their logo or their website on your downloadable e‑book and trade for putting your logo on their homepage.  They don't worry about, you know giving away too many copies because what happens is that people who really don't want to read the whole book online.  So, when they start reading it, they get really excited about it, and then, their eyes get tired so they would prefer to get a printed book, which is not as likely or go and get the book in full.  But, regardless you don't worry about that because you want people get excited about.  The more books you give away, the more people are going to talk about your book.  The more people who are going to talk about your book, then the more books you're going to sell in the end.   You know one thing I found is that so many people that were interested in reading the book that one of the people who have downloaded the book as an e-book invited all of his neighbors over to read the book on screen.  So, that was great advertisement for our book and again it didn't cost me one penny.  The best former advertisement you could ever have is free and that is the word of mouth advertisement.  It's natural, it's instinctual, and it works.   So whenever you promote your book, your e-book with links from articles and other sources, make sure you have a link to the book instead of just your website so they can download the book directly from that article or for that form or wherever that link you may have.  One of the most famous author that was successful at this, who have Seff Groden [ph 05:47] who was able to attract so many people by giving away his e-book for free that he was able to attract the publisher and get a huge advance.   Now, if you're going to give away copies of your printed book, make sure you give it to book club owners that request a book or for message profounders or people that really represent a large number, and by following these tools of giving your book away, you can attract a huge audience.