Promoting books with free copies: On Kindle, Best Sellers Don’t Need to Sell

1) Amazon offers free samples of most books, where you can get hooked on a chapter and on the last page it has a call to action like: "Like this? (linky)Buy the book(/link)" It is one or two clicks (can't recall) until money has exchanged hands and the book is winding its way down the tubes to your device. This implementation is genius and they need to do more: for example, EVERY sci-fi/fantasy book needs to have, on the last page, "The epic tale of heroism, sensuality, and gratuitous buttkicking continues in (linky)Librarian Unchained(/linky)!"

2) Every author should have a blog. Every author should have an email list. You should be using both of these to sell or give away things to your fans. ("Hiya guys! Happy Valentine's Day! Since you've been so good to me, I'm giving you a little treat: a free sneak peak at my next novel, and one invitation that you can send to a very special someone.") It is absolutely insane that I can spend literally hundreds to thousands of dollars on books from one author or publisher and yet nobody at any point tries to capture my details to sell me more of the stuff that I clearly want to buy.

3) Apparently the book industry thinks word of mouth drives most book purchases. First, that is probably malarky, an old wives' tail which has no basis in empirical fact. The majority of books are probably sold due to being the event books which receive heavy promotion, go to the top of the lists, and can be picked up or clicked on without being searched for. (The Kindle -- wonderful device that it is -- SUCKS for searching for books, except by going to the genre stacks and sorting by sales. It is like it was designed by the same guy who did the App Store.)

Instead of using unscientific malarky, they should start actually TRACKING to see who is buying books and why. People will happily tell you this if you give them a reason to do it: for example, the author who they consider a close person in their lives just asks them to, or they're offered a freebie for their time. (Amazon is in a much better position to do this than either authors or publishers. If one player in the market is structurally guaranteed to be the only one with accurate analytics, I think I can pick the winner already.)

Even better, they were both by authors that I haven't read before.