People have been asking me lately why I periodically give away free copies of my backlist titles. I did it yesterday with my short story collection The Necessary Havoc of Love. Mainly I want people to read books that would otherwise disappear. There’s also that magic term advertisers use: name recognition. Does it giving away copies of my older titles gain attention for my recent books?

It’s tough to quantify, but here are a couple of little facts. 

As part of my experiment in republishing, I’ve given away 15,655 copies of my backlist titles over the past two years. (I just checked. That includes the copies of the short story collection from yesterday.) The ebooks have been downloaded by people from Ethiopia, India, the Netherlands, the U.S., Mexico, Ireland, Denmark and many other places, including Iran.

Second, something weird has been happening with my new novel, Far Creek Road. Last week, my editor told me the book is selling four times the number of copies online as it sells in bookstores. That’s the opposite of the usual sales pattern for a Canadian literary novel, which usually sells far more robustly in bookstores than it does online. My editor said the marketing people at my publisher, ECW Press, have no idea why that’s happening. They haven’t run any promotions that would lead to elevated online sales.

So I wonder if my freebie campaign has helped pick up readers outside Canada, where people have to buy the novel on Amazon. And in fact, I noticed a recent 5-star review of Far Creek Road on Goodreads in which the reviewer says she “loved it.” She’s listed as being a PhD candidate and bookstore owner in Tehran. 

Tehran? Seriously? She must have heard about it online. I can’t imagine anything else. 

All of which leads to today’s thought. I’ve decided to update and republish an earlier post for other writers and interested readers: a quick how-to guide to republishing older titles. That way, maybe other people can use a few techniques I’ve picked up to and boost their online sales. 

How To Bring Back Your Backlist

Backlist titles are a writer’s older books that were originally brought out by an established publisher. When a backlist title stops selling, the publisher usually stops keeping it in print as a paperback, although it doesn’t cost much to let a recent-ish title float on the cloud as an ebook. Yet even an ebook involves stock control, and sometimes the publisher will voluntarily send the writer a letter giving back the rights to the book, including the right to republish. 

Usually, however, the book dies quietly, even when it’s available online, unpromoted and unread. 

In that case, a writer can often get a letter from the publisher giving them the right to republish the book. Reversion of rights, it’s called. In my case, ECW Press owns the rights to my three most recent novels and keeps them all in print. However, over the past few years, my six earlier books—published by four different publishers—began disappearing from view. Since I still like the books, I started getting back the right to bring them out again myself. 

Download Far Creek Road here

I’ve written a couple of blogs about how writers can get their rights back starting here. Afterward, it’s time to republish the book. In my experience, readers don’t buy paperbacks of older titles online, and bookstores won’t stock them. That means I don’t bother bringing my backlist out in paper and advise others against doing so. But it’s easy to bring the book out as an ebook on one of three main self-publishing sites: Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, Draft2Digital/Smashwords and IngramSpark. After preparing the right file, you can publish your title for free on all three sites. Once again, I’ve published a how-to guide starting here. 

After you’ve republished your backlist titles, the marketing begins. Writers can take online seminars to learn how to do this, including free classes offered by self-publishing guru David Gaughran. Many useful videos and tutorials are banked on his website, and you can sign up for his free newsletter, which lands somewhat irregularly in your inbox. Jane Friedman is another online presence who offers a free newsletter on self-publication, although she charges $25 US for her online seminars. I find are worth it, although both Friedman and David Gaughran focus on commercial fiction, and Gaughran offers particularly detailed advice on the best way to both write and publicize original, never-before-released genre novels. 

Since I’m republishing literary novels—some would say novels in the literary genre—I’ve had to tweak their advice so I can reach a slightly different audience in slightly different ways.

One thing that’s useful to remember whatever genre you write in: it’s usually only a writer’s family and friends who realize their backlist titles aren’t newly-published books. Readers in other countries have no idea that a blacklist title has been around for a while. (Ehm, neither do many readers in Canada.) That adds up to a huge market of potential readers you can tap into.

The quickest way to do this is by periodically offering your ebooks for free. As I say, I don’t mind offering freebies, since my main goal in republishing my backlist is to get people to read my work. I wrote the books, I stand by them, and I’m happy to get them into peoples’ hands. There’s also the fact that literary writers are used to not making money–that’s a joke, but a pained one–so giving away older titles doesn’t bother me. 

On the other hand, genre writers want to put their new titles in front of an audience so they can try to earn a living—and self-publishing genre writers can earn well into the six figures these days through frequent publication and exhaustive marketing campaigns. (By which I mean campaigns that exhaust me even to think about.) Yet their process involves offering freebies as well. Loss leaders, as Gaughran says, when setting out his detailed how-to campaign. 

So how do you give away a freebie?

It’s actually quite easy. There are a number of reputable newsletters with many thousands of email subscribers–-sometimes into the hundreds of thousands–-who want to download free or discounted ebooks. You buy an ad in one of these newsletters for a specific day on which your book will be free, usually paying between $30 and $150 U.S. for each ad. The fees are in the $30 range for children’s books and a bit more for literary novels and non-fiction, since the subscriber lists are shorter. Ads for genre books cost more. On the day you’ve chosen, the newsletter will shoot out the ad to their subscribers, along with a link to your book’s page on Amazon. (I’ll tell you how to set that up in a minute).

As I said above, since the beginning of 2022, I’ve given away 15,655 copies of seven backlist books. The total cost for this promotional experiment is somewhere around $750 over two years. How many people actually read the freebies they downloaded? I have no idea, although a recent study by BookNet of the number of people who read the books they’d bought in bookstores depressed the hell out of my editor. So if 50 per cent of people who downloaded a freebie finished it, I’m fine with that. 

Here’s another question: did this form of advertising sell many copies of my most recently-published books? Name recognition and all that. I don’t know the answer to that one either, but as I said above, my latest novel, Far Creek Road, is selling online at a surprising rate—even in Tehran. (There, one copy is pretty surprising.)

In any case, below are links to several of the newsletters, all of which make buying an ad very easy. Just follow the prompts on their sites, and choose a date for the freebie that suits. I’ve mainly used Freebooksy and The Fussy Librarian. The others are cheaper but they reach fewer people.

And now for some really granular info, even though I hate the word granular. 

If you’ve have reached this point, you’ve already published your backlist title(s) on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing site. Again, I wrote about how to do this in my earlier posts. Now you sign onto your Bookshelf page and click Promote and Advertise beside the title you want to offer for free. That will take you to a page where you sign up for KDP Select, which makes your title exclusive to Amazon for three months. If they don’t have an exclusive, Amazon won’t let you offer freebies. Once your book is up on KDP Select, you can click on Free Book Promotion and choose the date for the promo that you’ve already selected on the newsletter site. That’s it. Or almost. 

Here’s the trick. Once you’re finished with KDP, you need to go to your author pages on both Smashwords and IngramSpark to depublish the title you’re promoting for the same three month-period. If you don’t, Amazon will find out and scold you, threatening to cancel your freebie when you’ve already paid for an ad in one of the newsletters. It’s easy to depublish a title on Smashwords, where you go to your personal page and hit unpublish beside the title of the book you’re promoting. IngramSpark takes more time, since you have to email them your request to unpublish. I ended up leaving the site because just about everything takes too much time there, but other people like it. Up to you.

There’s also this: A few days after you sign up your book for Kindle Direct, go back to the Promote Your Book on Amazon page and click Manage Your KDP Enrolment. This is where you’ll be able to keep Amazon from auto-renewing the book on KDP, which prevents you from publishing it anywhere else. Clear the box allowing auto-renewal and you’re done.

Of course, there are a couple of workarounds to Amazon’s predatory practices. David Gaughran pushes writers to buy ads on Facebook, which he says he finds is an efficient way to sell books. However, it’s far more work than buying an ad in a newsletter. You have to prepare the ad yourself using a design site like Canva, then navigate Facebook’s arcane marketing page to put up your ad—making sure to follow Gaughran’s advice step-by-step to avoid wasting your money. You can start with the first tutorial here and duck into others in his series about Facebook. It’s very clear, but frankly I can’t be bothered doing that much work to give away a backlist novel. I also suspect the process works better for a series of genre novels than it does for a standalone literary book. However, if you’d like to give it a try, tell me how it goes.

And there’s also this:

You can still offer your e-book at a discount the same day on both Smashwords and Amazon—charging, say, 99 cents or $1.99. A newsletter called Bargain Booksy publicizes discounts rather than freebies for the price of three or four lattes. I haven’t had much success trying this. When I bought an ad for a discounted title in 2021, it sold precisely 12 copies. I suspect this option works better for genres writers who are publishing a series. But–no harm, no foul. The dozen sales were enough to pay for the ad, so I might try it again. Yet if my second attempt moves only another dozen copies, I’m not sure I’ll bother trying a third time. These things don’t require a lot of work, but it’s still 20 minutes of my precious life gone forever.

There’s something else to consider, too. Giving away e-books doesn’t just net you readers. It can also lead to reviews and ratings on Goodreads and Amazon. After I put up my story collection Hard Travel as a freebie, readers posted a few four- and five-star ratings over the next week. If your promo generates not only a surge of downloads but high ratings as well, Amazon’s all-seeing algorithm will start suggesting your book to people looking at other books on the site. “If you liked that, you might also like Lesley Krueger’s novel…” Which, at least theoretically, has an effect on both your sales and your profile-–I’m still thinking about my reader in Tehran–-although it’s hard to measure how much.

More measurably, it makes your book attractive to the big cheese newsletter that advertises discounts and freebies. BookBub reaches millions of subscribers, so many that it’s expensive to advertise there, with ads costing into the thousands of dollars. Unlike the cheaper newsletters above, BookBub also vets the books it advertises. It claims to sell ads to only twenty per cent of the writers who want to buy one, guaranteeing subscribers a certain level of professionalism in the books it offers. 

To assess quality, the site checks the number and strength of ratings on both Amazon and Goodreads. A book needs to have a decent number of ratings of three stars and above before the writer is allowed to buy an ad. Successful self-publishing writers claim they can make back the cost of the ad within 24 hours. I haven’t tried it recently, not since it’s gone so glossy and expensive. But many self-publishing gurus advise using the cheaper sites until you get enough ratings for BookBub. Then you hold your breath, pay your money, and pray for the gold ring. (You’ll have to google Bookbub to reach the site. It keeps wanting to connect to my account when I try to post a link.)

Did I say that giving away 15,655 copies of your books would be easy? It took me a while to figure this much out, and I’ve got more tricks to try. Sometimes I think of it as a game, and set up a promo when I’m bored just to see how it plays out. No coincidence that I started spending time getting back the rights to my backlist titles when we first locked down for the pandemic. Nor that I started the freebie campaign a year later. (Sourdough bread was never baked on these premises.) 

I also like to think about all those thousands of people reading my backlist titles, in Ethiopia and Ireland and Denmark. Maybe they brighten up the world a little for my readers. Give them something to think about. Why else do we write?

That, and to connect. Hello, Tehran.