Got the following email:
Happy holidays, Paul! My girlfriend’s birthday was yesterday, and I seem to have wandered into my own little Christmas story. My girlfriend actually cried when I showed her her birthday present this year. I’d written her a free Kindle ebook about her dog! I’d told her it was a scavenger hunt, and the first clue would come up when she typed in her dog’s name into the Kindle Store. So she did – and there he was! She saw a picture of her own dog staring back at her – as the cover of a Kindle ebook!”
Besides being a great gift, something even stranger happened. I woke up the next morning and discovered it had become one of Amazon’s best-selling children’s ebooks about dogs! (It’s actually gaining on “The Poky Little Puppy.”)
Now we’re thinking about making it a paid ebook, and then donating most of the proceeds to an animal rescue shelter.—
Jon Cog / “Moe Zilla”
Author of Our Dog Lucca
This is a really tangential question, but if anyone reading this knows the answer I hope you’ll humor me:
How does one make a Kindle book free? My KDP control panel won’t let me price anything lower than 99 cents. When I contacted Amazon to ask, they told me that they only make such arrangements for publishers with large catalogs.
Michael,
They’re doing it for authors who agree to add their ebooks to the Prime Lending program. I think they get to do Free promos for a few days every 90 days (something like that) and this unleashed about 670 free books a day so that few were noticed after all in that avalanche. Some of us stopped writing about free books during that time.
In the meantime, they can’t offer their books elsewhere while getting the add’l exposure
from Amazon program. But they don’t have to renew Prime lending and benefits (a shared money pot is involved too) after 90 days, from what I gathered (though I have no reason to be certain of that).
The borrowable books went from 5300+ to 45,000 when I noticed and it’s at something like 65,000 as of this morning.