How to publish free ebooks
Is it possible to publish free ebooks?
StreetLib allows you to publish your ebooks and audiobooks by setting the selling price to €0.00. This means you can publish free ebooks, but keep in mind that a transaction fee will be applied for each download, as stipulated in the distribution agreement.
You'll always have access to complete sales data for each title, including free downloads and their costs, so you can decide when to make a free work available or remove it from your catalog.
How to Publish a Free Ebook
Setting the price of your eBooks to €0 is really simple. Simply set the price in the HUB, in the "Distribution" section of the product page:
Like any other metadata, the price can also be updated at any time, so if you change your mind about the selling price of your works, you can change it as explained here.
Free books on Amazon
Whatever your reason, it's important to remember that this doesn't work for all stores: if you're an indie author, for example, Amazon doesn't allow zero-euro eBooks, which means books priced under €0.99 will automatically be raised to this minimum threshold to be listed on this store. You can find more information on this in this article we've created for you.
The Kobo store manages the publication of free ebooks, but does not allow preorders. If you change the price during the presale period, Kobo will honor the price at which the customer purchased/ordered the book.
How to monitor/control free downloads
To give you greater transparency and control, you can verify the free downloads of your works in two ways:
- Analytics: the Analytics section of your account also tracks Free Downloads: you can view them by applying a filter by ISBN/Title or by Business Model, selecting "Free Downloads". This way you can see in aggregate how many free downloads each title received in the period of your choice ⬇️
- Product Insight (Hub): Free downloads are also visible at the individual item level, in the Product Insights section of your Hub. From there, you can see key statistics for each published title, including free downloads, along with other useful metrics.
Having this data allows you to turn every free download into a concrete opportunity to better plan your promotional strategy , which is why we are happy to have introduced this important feature.
Why publish a free ebook?
There are several reasons why it might be worth offering a free book. Basically, it's beneficial to offer a free book for a very specific period of time or as additional content for your promotion.
These are the most common cases:
- If you're publishing a second volume in a book series, perhaps the first volume could be available for free within the first few days of the second volume's release.
- You can use some pages of a book as a preview before publishing it and publish it for free as a small eBook.
- Free content is compatible with a book normally sold: a short story about a character in your novel, a book of poems that one of the characters might write, etc.
Of course, offering a free eBook also means focusing a lot on promotion and marketing ( we are experts!): just because a title is accessible for free, it doesn't mean it will definitely be downloaded or read.