Is Your Book Discoverable?

Do online shoppers even search for free books? Or are there just so many being offered that most free titles get overlooked?

KDP does not allow an author to price a book for $0.00. I'm not sure why, but maybe Amazon figures that even the sixty-four cents it earns on the sale of one ninety-nine cent book adds up over time. My books are all enrolled in KENP (free to read for Kindle Unlimited members), but it's been a long time since I've had any page reads ~ seventeen pages read in the last 90 days, which tells me someone really hated whatever book they chose. I wouldn't mind pricing all my books as free if I was given that option.

Instead, I can only utilize Kindle's free book promotion once every 90 days. Since I was thinking about The Apple yesterday, I thought, what the heck, why not give it a two-day free boost? (Five consecutive days have never produced any results for me.) Its first day was yesterday, and I've had no takers. I searched the first fourteen screens of both "free kindle books" and "free kindle books women's fiction" and The Apple didn't show up. I was in no mood to scroll through a hundred screens. Probably still wouldn't have found it.

I have no idea how the algorithm works. My first inclination was the number of sales, yet a novel that has only sold 65 copies showed up on the first screen. Ratings maybe? Not really. Some of the books displayed have very few reviews and sure, some four-star ratings, but who doesn't get four-star reviews? Even I have. It's certainly not the book covers. Several of the books have obvious Amazon-created covers ~ you know, the ones that are essentially one green stripe and one orange one. Publish date? That could be. The Apple is three years old. Does that put it at the very bottom of the list? I'm not about to scroll to the 400th listing to find out.

Determined to find my book's placement, I specifically searched for "The Apple". Know where I found it? On the 46th screen. Titles containing the word "apple" and even subtitles with that word showed up long before mine. Some books didn't include the word at all.

It seems I can't even give my books away. 🙄 It would help, though, if they were at least discoverable. 

I will never again utilize sites like FreeBooksy (if I ever did?) because I'm not going to pay for the privilege of no one grabbing my free book. The only investment I'm willing to make for no return is buying a one-dollar lottery ticket. At least there I could have a chance.