Giving it All Away - Is it Worth it?

Like other any fledgling author, I find being “discovered” the most daunting task when it comes to marketing my work.  There are literally a blue-millions worth of books out there for my work to get lost in.  I have to consider that even if someone stumbles across my work, how will they figure out if its worth while if there’s no other feedback other than my well designed and enticing description?  In other words, I’m talking about reviews.

Last week, a generous and industrious person decided to host an event on Facebook for authors from a specific genre to promote their work.  It was the Zombie Free E-Book Bonanza and it hosted a lot of authors in the zombie genre.  Some were fairly well established like Mark Tufo and Joe McKinney, but most were newbies looking for anyway to get the word out about their work.  

I lollygagged and came to the event late and decided to take my Zombie Novella, Forget the Alamo, and post it in the event for free.  

In terms of getting some exposure, it was wildly successful for me.  Over 300 people downloaded the book.  (327 to be exact.)  After seeing this, I decided to release one of my zombie short stories for free, too.  It got 107 downloads.  

You might ask,  how can I get make any money if I’m giving my books away for nothing?  And what does this mean?  

Obviously, my work is out there filling up space on a bunch of Kindle’s right now.  But does that mean that people will read my work?  And will that translate into reviews?  

After one week, here’s the tale of the tape in terms of reviews:

Forget the Alamo - 3 new reviews

Dangerous Game  - 0 new reviews

I also do have to point out that I also garnered one review on Goodreads and 3 ratings (2 - 5 stars & 1 4 star), plus four people marked it as a “to-read.”

In terms of sales, here’s what I’ve seen:

Forget the Alamo - 11 sales

Dangerous Game - 2 sales

Shutterbug - 1 sale

(Shutterbug is an older short story I put on Amazon late last year.)  

Anyway, the long and the short of it, is that I feel I’ve collected a bunch of free exposure that I never would have been able to get and I think that’s worth a great deal.  Time will tell if I get any more traction and I’ll certainly will share those future results.

UPDATE: I went back and looked and I actually had over 420 downloads of Forget the Alamo. The ones I missed in my original review were from Amazon's foreign stores (UK, Canada, & Denmark.)