Dan C. Rinnert said:
Is your goal with the book to make sales or grow your list?
Here's what I think may happen with a potential buyer . . . Your potential buyer is someone that wants to learn how to be a successful blogger, right? So, if I'm that prospect and I find your book, one of the things I am going to do before buying is to check out your blog, which is listed in your Biography on the book's page.
Once on your blog, I see I can get the book free if I join your list. So, why would I want to go back to Amazon to buy it?
Yeah, that can happen. And I hope it does. This marketing tactic wasn't something I thought of myself, I did a lot of research on the issue and noticed that a lot of top bloggers are offering their free ebook on Amazon for anything between $0.99 and $4.99.
Jeff Goins is an example of this. He offers
The Writer's Manifesto for free on his site but the book has over 60 reviews on Amazon and is always top of the rankings. I suspect he's getting at least 20 downloads a day. So yes, some people will go to the blog, but a lot won't, and that's been demonstrated by the sales from bloggers.
Plus, I'm offering the PDF version, not the epub and kindle versions. People with ereaders may prefer to just buy the kindle version. I know I'd be happy to pay a buck if I wanted to read a book better on my kindle (as viewing pdf''s are terrible).
My intention is definitely to grow my list with this book. The sales income for this book is irrelevant but I need my book to sell more in order to go higher up the rankings. I considered offering the book for free everywhere however another reason I want to offer this book in all book stores for a set fee was to see which performs the best.
If I find that Amazon is outselling all other book stores 10 to one after a month or two, I'll probably just go exclusive with Amazon (again, I don't agree with their exclusivity requirements etc but it's where the buyers are for the most part). I'll probably make this book for free if I do go exclusive with Amazon. I'm still undecided though. I'm investing a lot in building my email list so I know I can sell a lot of books directly through my own website too.