Jeff Hutcheson was closing in on the end of the third novel in his Lost Key cozy mystery series. “I might want to think about doing a little marketing,” he told me.

“A discount book promotion followed by Amazon and/or Facebook ads is a great idea!” my Incubation Press associate, Keri Barnum, replied in an email. “Ideally, a discount book promotion would happen when the third book is on pre-order or newly available… but you can run discount book promotions every three months. Depending on your timing, you might fit one promo in prior to book #3 launching, and one in conjunction with book #3 launching.”

A week later, Jeff and I were on a Zoom call with Keri.

We first talked about what advertising his series on Amazon and Facebook would look like. I’ll write more about that in a different post. For now, the piece that stuck out to me was that we would only be advertising the series’ first book, Going Barefoot. Once hooked, readers wouldn’t need further prompting when it came to purchasing the books that followed.

The same logic applied when the discussion turned to running a discount book promotion. We would offer severely discounted—or even free—Going Barefoot e-books for a handful of days, and promote the deal in at least two discount e-book newsletters such as:

• Fussy Librarian
• Just Kindle Books
• Bargain Booksy
• Robin’s Reads, etc.

At first, Jeff sounded less than completely enthused about the idea of offering his book for little to nothing. Keri pointed out that since we were talking about an e-book promotion, there are no publishing-related hard costs, so he wasn’t exactly going to be losing money. And, we reminded him, if the reader of the discounted or free e-book liked what they read, they’d move on to the second and third mysteries in the series, which they would purchase at full price.

Point taken.

But the benefits don’t stop there.

This discount book promotion not only increases readership of the e-book, since plenty of people love a deal, but all those new readers also drive Amazon’s online algorithms. That’s why it makes sense to give them the best possible deal, since even readers who get your e-book for 99 cents—or free—count. Besides, new readers mean more reviews, which helps sales.

The discount promotion delivered, especially after we followed it up with advertising campaigns. But that’s another post for another day.