Free For All: How We Gave Away Over 15,000 Copies of “Running the Edge” in Two Days!

As self published authors we enjoy the freedom to do whatever we want with our book. We have done many different give aways, charity drives, and donations but last week we wanted to GO BIG!  We decided to celebrate Adam and Kara’s 11th anniversary and Tim’s 41st birthday by giving away our e-book to anyone who wanted it. Some people (and certainly publishers) would call that idea crazy but we are runners so crazy comes naturally!

At the end of the two day free for all, we had given away 15,209 copies of our book.  At a list price of $9.99 that comes to $151,937.91 worth of free e-books!

(Note: if you missed our last post and have no idea what we are talking about, here is the link)

Is it crazy to give away over 15,000 copies of a book?  Maybe. But here are three reasons we are glad we did it!

#1.  We wanted to give back and say, ”Thank You!” to all of the people who support us. We know many readers are on tight budgets so this was a good way to get the book into their hands.

#2.  Because they were e-books, the giveaway didn’t actually cost us anything. We might have lost some potential sales from people who would have paid for the book, but that is ok too.

#3. We are hoping that many of the people who downloaded the book for free will enjoy it enough to recommend it to friends or buy more copies as Christmas presents or perhaps give us a good review on amazon.

Beyond these three rational reasons, the best reason this was a good idea (although less rational) is that it was a BLAST!  The fun factor of these two days was off the charts as we watched the numbers pile up!  Before we started, we set a goal  to give away 2,000 copies. We thought if we promoted well and had a little luck we might even hit 3,000.  Imagine our surprise when we checked halfway through the first day and saw we were already over 3,000! We did a little happy dance and set a new goal to get to 10,000 copies.  After a couple more posts and facebook, and a few shout-outs, the numbers were steadily climbing.  Our blog about the giveaway shot up to over 6,000 hits before 10:00pm and our inbox filled up with awesome emails!

The highlight of the whole experience came when we checked a graph of our ranking on amazon and saw that out of the over 1 million books available for free that day, we were ranked #9!  More happy dancing followed this news and we started taking screen shots to commemorate this fantastic day!  Here are a few.

Now that the dust has settled, and we have had time to reflect, we are convinced that this was the perfect addition to our anniversary/birthday celebrations! Not many people can say they gave away $151,000 worth of presents to complete strangers to celebrate their special occasions!  The question is, “How are we going to top this experience next year?”

Thanks again for all of your support and for following our blog/facebook page!  YOU make what we do fun!

Want more?

If you did not get a chance to download the free e-book, you can still buy it from the Kindle store.  And because you made it all the way to the bottom of this blog post, we are about to give you the “super secret discount code” to get the hard copy of our book for only $11.95!!  This code will expire next week so click here to take advantage!

Here is the Super Secret Discount Code:  Enter the code “IAMMAVEN” at checkout to get the discounted price. Then hit “update cart.” You can order as many as you like.  Plus automatically get FREE shipping on orders of three or more copies!

 Note: you must click the “Add to Cart” button from the store and not the “Order Now” button on the banner in order to enter the discount code.