While Kindle offers brilliant opportunities for authors, it also offers great opportunities to readers. And you don’t have to have a Kindle to avail of free Kindle books – you can download the free Kindle app to your smartphone, iPad or laptop – for free. A lot of people think you can’t read a book on a smartphone, and it isn’t ideal, but the beauty of an eBook is that you can adjust the size of the font to suit you – so they are great for anyone with eyesight difficulties. The Kindle app is a very handy one to have on your phone when you’re stuck in an airport with your hand luggage already straining, or you’re reading to a child who is desperate for the next in a series!
There are around 42,000 books available free every day in the Kindle store. Some are good, some are great and some are not so great. To find something that will suit you, read the reviews and take a look at the sample before you buy. Take a look at the cover – does it look like a book that you’d pick up in a bookshop? If the author has invested time and money in their cover, the chances are that they’ve invested time and effort in their writing too. But be selective – you’ve nothing to lose when you download a free book, but you don’t want to clog up your Kindle or mobile with books you aren’t going to enjoy.
The good the bad and the slightly odd
A huge number of classics are free on Kindle, ideal for anyone studying English or who missed out at school – and if you have a book club, why not pick a classic for a change? From a Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, to Little Women, Dracula, Frankenstein, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the works of Shakespeare , Jane Eyre & Wuthering Heights, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, and Les Miserables the choice is huge. And for children there are books like Five Children and It and Black Beauty.
There is no question that there are always some unusual books available for free – I found How to Clean Your Mattress and a couple of oddly titled books, Wet Dessert and Adventures with my Guardian Angel, Thirty Unbelievable True Stories (perhaps that should have been ‘unbelievable but true’) and also Thai Cookery by the Average Chef. Ho hum. Let’s hope he’s better than average if he’s writing a cookery book.
Why are they free?
Most authors give their books away for free to promote their work – it’s not reflection on the quality – the Kindle Direct Publishing platform allows authors to give their book away for up to 5 days in every 90 if you guarantee it’s exclusivity to Amazon, and it’s a great tool to increase a book’s visibility and increase paid sales.
From an author’s point of view, as Steve Mosby explained in his excellent article for writing.ie there are three types of people who might pick up a free book – someone who only buys free books, so is never likely to buy an author’s paid-for book, people who want to try something new and who may buy a subsequent book if they like an author’s writing, and those who know an author’s work and for whom getting a book for free is a bonus.
Whoever downloads the book, it’s a winner for the author as high free book ‘sales’ push their books up the rankings, and it’s a winner for the reader who may discover a new author they love. American author Mike Wells, currently based in Oxford, England, and teaching creative writing, has written a series of thrillers, the first of which Lust is available free – it’s an excellent way to introduce new readers to his writing and to push the rest of the series.
Crossing genre
Kindle has allowed all sorts of books that would never make it into print to reach readers, which has greatly increased the choice – books that might not fit neatly into a recognised print genre on a bookshop shelf are now available digitally. If you enjoy romance for instance, you can read romantic thrillers, romantic sci-fi, sub genres from inter-species romance to paranormal or supernatural romance, not to mention Fifty Shades and countless books like it.
Eileen Gormley is one half of the team who wrote the Irish Fifty Shades, Pleasures of Winter (Penguin 2012) her book Don’t Feed the Faeries was No.1 in Interspecies Romance and is part of the KDP Select programme so will be free periodically. Another cross genre book is Housewife With a Half Life by Alison Wells, a comic literary sci-fi adventure through parallel worlds in which a mother (of twins) saves the universe.
Indeed, the next 50 Shades has every chance of being a Kindle book – there are authors on Kindle selling hundreds of thousands of books and getting great reviews – Russell Blake is an American thriller writer whose book JET is free at the time of writing – JET has had 200 reviews giving it a firm 5 star rating. UK author Mel Sherratt is another thriller writer whose books had too much romance in them for traditional print, her book Taunting the Dead was a Kindle No 1 and she’s sold over 100,000 copies across her various titles in under a year. Books still sell by recommendation and Fifty Shades was discovered by a book club on Goodreads. Let’s hope the next the big seller is Irish.
Not just fiction
As with your book store, there are a huge number of both fiction and non fiction titles available to read. If a book is free you can afford to branch out and try something new.
Can you trust reviews?
Amazon have recently clamped down on reviews and have been removing them from author’s books if they suspect they have been done by other authors – there was recently a big scandal in crime writing circles when an author was discovered to have praised his own books in reviews submitted under various pseudonyms – which is one thing – but he went on to give one star reviews to his competitors. Generally if you read reviews and see where the reviewers are from you can get a feel for how genuine they are. And look for a mixture of reviews, not everyone loves everything they read – even the top selling authors have a few one and two star reviews – they can be a good thing for readers as they give balance and show that the responses are real.
Sharing
Kindles registered to the same Amazon account can share books, and for UK and US users, one book a month can be borrowed free from the Kindle lending library. Let’s hope this comes to Ireland soon.
Piracy
While there are sites that allow you to illegally download books for free, in these instances, authors aren’t paid a royalty. Unlike the music industry where major corporations are behind most bands, when you illegally download a book, you’re defrauding individuals who earn little enough as it is – it’s a bit of a kick in the teeth unless you love their book and go on to buy more.
Finding Free Books
To find what’s free on a given day, look for the Top 100 Free Chart, search for free books in your Kindle store or visit one of the many websites highlighting free books – these include Free eBooks.net, Pixels of Ink, Free eBooks Daily and many more.
And if you do get a book for free, consider leaving a review on Amazon as a thank you.
