Monday, December 1, 2014

Free Stephen Leather eBooks - Why I'm A Big Fan Of Free!

I was one of the first authors to give away free eBooks. It always seemed to me that it was the best way of bringing in new readers.

It was deodorant that first give me the idea, believe it or not!

I was walking through a train station in London and a couple of pretty girls were giving out samples of Nivea deodorant, small, dark blue cans.  Now at that point I wasn't a fan of spray deodorants. I prefer aftershave and don't like mixing the two.

But the girls were pretty and smiling and before I knew what had happened, I had a can in my hand.

I went home and next day I used it. And I immediately became a fan. It stops you sweating and it smells great. That was about five years ago and I have used their product regularly ever since. I used it this morning, and again in the gym this afternoon.

The lesson I learned was that if you give someone something for free and they like it, they will become a fan. And it seemed to me that you could do the same with books. So I started giving away free short stories as eBooks and over the last few years I have probably given away well over 100,000 copies a year. And the graphs suggest that when downloads of my free books goes up, shortly afterwards my paid-for sales also rise.

You can now see all my free eBooks on one site - HERE IT IS



4 comments:

  1. Dear Mr. Leather,
    I'm a big fan of your Dan Sheperd novels (I LOVE them) and now bought all short stories I could get my hands on.
    But I'm somehow dissappointed because in my home country (Germany) your free story "Natural selection" costs twice as much as all the other stories. Not that I won't pay for my new reading material, but I think it's kind of unfair that I have to pay (in fact more than for the other stories) only because I'm not living in the UK.
    Best regards
    Johanna Gaebel

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  2. I think it's an Amazon thing, Johanna. They add a delivery charge. I think they do it for all countries outside the UK and I agree it's unfair, especially when a book is supposed to be free! You can get them on Smashwords for free and put them on your Kindle, or you can get a free PDF from Smashowrds. Have a great New Year!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you so much!
      I wish you a great New Year and successful writing!

      Delete
  3. Do composite leather basketballs peel off easily?
    Stephen Leather books

    ReplyDelete