The American Game Will Be Free on Kindle

Beginning tomorrow, July 1, The American Game will be free on Amazon Kindle.  It will be free for 5 days, (July 1-5) to celebrate the 4th of July weekend.  You can download it at:  http://www.amazon.com/American-Game-Jeff-McArthur-ebook/dp/B00LJII7GG/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1435710093

Why do we give away books for free when we worked so long and hard on them?  Well, there are a couple reasons, but I'm first going to explain a reason that's somewhat unique to me.

I first wanted to make this story into a movie, and I tried to get it made for 18 years.  A child could literally have been born and grown up to adulthood in the time it took me to get this story told.  (And one that I knew actually did.)  That would seem like all the more reason to charge a lot for the book and not give it away for free.  However, in my view, I spent so much time on this book that no matter how much I charge for it, I would never make enough money to equal the time I put into it.

But the main reason that people in general do the KDP Select free giveaway is because it generates interest, and helps them get noticed.  How does it do this?  Well, first of all, Amazon places listings based on the number of downloads a book has had so far, not only how much money it's made.  Therefore, if you get 10,000 downloads and make no money you're going to go further up the chart than the person who made $100 and had 500 downloads.  Authors who are further up the chart get noticed more by other readers and then get more sales.

A good way to describe it is to have you imagine one person in a park.  He's shouting out a message, and no one's listening to him because it's just a crazy guy in a park trying to get people's attention.  When three or four people join him, well, it becomes a small group, but it's still probably just a group of crazy people.  However, when a bigger and bigger crowd gathers, this starts to catch people's attention.  And then when this group turns into a crowd huddled around a large area of the park, it really gets other people's attention, and soon people are going to the park just to see what that crowd is all about.  That initial crowd is the people who downloaded your book for free, and the other people coming are those whose attention was grabbed because of that crowd.  The trick now is to get them to pay.

I'm going to report on this giveaway as I do it.  I've been preparing for this giveaway for a month now.  I'll describe how I prepared in another blog, and then report on the results as they come in.  Keep following to see how it goes.