The Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform allows independent authors to publish Kindle e-books. The KDP Select Program is a publishing agreement between Amazon and the author. When the author enrolls in the program, they can take advantage of the several marketing tools that are on offer, one of them being able to offer your book for free downloads. The KDP Select programme is a rolling programme of 90 days.

So once you are a member of the Select program, you can then opt in to give away your book for free. You can offer your book as free for up to 5 days during the 90 day enrollment period. The idea of doing so is for your book to gain massive exposure; people who are interested in buying it will have more incentive to do so as it will be free. Hopefully, people will buy your book and it will appear in the kindle #free chart; this chart appears alongside the #paid chart in every category of book, so once again people browsing the paid books chart will be able to see your book in the free chart, again helping your book to gain more exposure.

So free days are brilliant for enhancing your book and gaining downloads, especially if you are in the top 100 #free chart; however, does this guarantee sales and reviews? Firstly, reviews - many self-published authors have said that even though they may have seen a few hundred downloads of their book over a 5-day period this is no guarantee of being reviewed. Sadly, many people will download a book simply because it is free, and many will not even read it, they just like a bargain. However, this is the chance that you take;you hope for a few reviews, but there is no guarantee.

Then are you guaranteed more sales? When offering your book for free download, by default if it sells many books this will push it up the sales ranks of the paid book charts once your book is back to its normal selling price. So if enough people download your book you will be in an elevated position as regards to sales, thus  any potential buyer looking at the sales ranking may be more slightly swayed to buy as your book may appear to be more popular.

You also hope that people who have downloaded your free book will tell their family and friends about how good the book is and they in turn will go and buy it; however, this is not guaranteed.

You really don’t have anything to lose by offering your book for free as you will hopefully generate more free sales and this in turn will allow more people access to it so more people will become aware of its presence. After all, book marketing is all about exposure and offering your book for free is an extremely effective marketing plan. But do not expect to suddenly sell thousands of books overnight as, sadly, this will not happen.