3 Good Reasons to Give Away Your Book for Free
Giving away your book – or a few chapters of it – might feel counterintuitive.
After spending all that time and effort planning, writing, and editing your book, the focus should be on making sales, right?
Not necessarily! When done strategically, giving away your book for free can be a powerful tool to grow your business.
Thinking of your book as a product is a short-term strategy. For long-term success, business owners need to look beyond the misconceptions of giving away their book and see it as an essential part of their wider business strategy.
When used as a lead magnet – and paired with ScoreApp’s quiz marketing software – a free book can:
- Position you as a key industry authority
- Help you generate high-quality leads
- Create new revenue opportunities across your business
This article will explore 3 compelling reasons to give your book away for free, and how ScoreApp can help you maximise the impact in each case!
1. Giving away your book builds trust and authority
Picture the scene… You’re browsing the website of a business you might be interested in working with, and decide to download a free lead magnet that promises loads of value and helpful advice.
Then, when you open it, you discover it is full of generic information, with constant attempts to upsell you on a premium product or service.
It doesn’t make you want to work with that business, does it?
This is a common problem with lead magnets. The opposite happens when you give away your book for free.
It takes, on average, eight touchpoints to convert an interested lead into a fully-fledged prospect.
The more valuable your content is, the quicker people move through your sales funnel.
Your book has been written to directly address your ideal client. It’s full of genuinely valuable content that demonstrates your knowledge and problem-solving skills. By speaking directly to them and addressing their pain points and aspirations, you show them you understand their perspective.
When you give it away for free, your ideal clients see more than your generosity. They establish you as a trusted authority in their minds.
How ScoreApp helps
One of the key ways to build trust and authority with your ideal client is to provide personalized experiences.
According to research by McKinsey, 71% of customers now expect personalized experiences from businesses, and 76% feel frustrated when these aren’t delivered.
Of course, you can’t write a personalized book for every lead. However, with a ScoreApp quiz or assessment, you can create an individual experience for everyone who is interested in your book.
For example, the owner of an accountancy firm could write a book about how to maximize profit to scale a business to 7 figures.
To promote this book, build trust, and encourage more interest, they could also set up a Business Financial Healthcheck Quiz to give readers immediate insight into their business finances by analyzing their existing cashflow, profitability, and infrastructure.
With our landing page builder, which includes over 50 customizable drag-and-drop sections, you can create a digital home that showcases your book content in minutes!
Once it’s set up, build trust and authority, and generate lots of lovely new leads by sharing your quiz everywhere.
Your social media, website, paid ads…the goal is to get as many people as possible to see your book and want to learn more!
The fact that a quiz is an engaging, interactive, and highly personalized experience makes people want to complete it AND share it with other people too.
After completing your quiz, each lead receives more than your book.
They also receive an individual Scorecard that breaks their quiz results into a digestible report about the areas they are struggling in, alongside practical tips on how to improve their situation.
Plus, using a quiz helps to reinforce your authority and gives your readers more opportunities to apply what they’ve learned.
You can then use ScoreApp to analyze insights on what your audience finds valuable based on their quiz results, and refine the promotional content around your book to deepen engagement.
We have hundreds of ready-to-use templates you can use to build your quiz.
Here are a few of our favorites for promoting your book:
2. Giving away your book generates high-quality leads
Another reason you should give away your book for free is that downloading it is a strong signal of interest, either in your area of expertise or in you as an individual.
You might be concerned that giving away such a valuable resource will attract people who only want free knowledge…and are therefore unlikely to convert.
However, the majority of people who read your book will have a real interest in what you offer.
By providing an unusual level of value upfront, you build a strong relationship with your audience.
When you reach out with an offer, this high base level of trust will make it much easier to convert these people into paying clients.
How ScoreApp helps
With ScoreApp, you can capture much more than people’s contact details when they download your book.
Carefully worded quiz questions can be a game-changer in effectively pre-qualifying your leads. You could ask people if they would like to know more about your products and services, or the budget they would have to work with you.
Our AI quiz marketing software automatically adds everyone who fills out your quiz to your list of warm leads.
With the responses you collect, you can segment this list into different audience groups. You might think this is too time-consuming, but ScoreApp automates the process for you!
For example, if you are a life coach, you could segment your audience based on:
- People who are interested in an on-demand course
- People who are interested in group coaching
- People who are interested in personalized 1:1 coaching.
You can then use this information to set up automated email marketing journeys to deliver targeted follow-ups and offers to the people who seem most likely to buy, based on the products or services that will suit them best.
ScoreApp can be directly integrated with the major CRM and email marketing tools, including Keap, Mailchimp, Hubspot, and ActiveCampaign, and connected to a further 3000 marketing tools using Zapier.
3. Giving away your book increases revenue opportunities
Finally, giving your book away creates a friction-free way for high-quality leads to enter your wider business ecosystem.
Once readers trust your expertise, they are more likely to invest in your higher-ticket products and services, such as consulting, courses, or memberships.
To capitalize on this opportunity, use strategic calls-to-action (CTAs) throughout your book.
For example, if you are a business strategist who has written a book about goal-setting, you could guide readers towards the next step with CTAs like:
- “Schedule a free consultation”
- “Join my program”
- “Browse my courses”
- “Take the quiz” – including a URL to your quiz within your book helps to embed it into the experience, and encourages more people to take it!
You should repeat these CTAs throughout your sales funnel to capitalize on as many upselling and cross-selling opportunities as possible.
You could also host a live Q&A webinar about your book to speak to your readers directly, answer their questions, and tell them more about the products or services you have to offer.
How ScoreApp helps
Firstly, quiz conversion rates sit between 30% and 50%: around 10 times higher than static lead magnets.
That’s a lot more people looking at your business – and a lot more opportunities to increase revenue!
ScoreApp’s in-depth data analytics can track engagement with your book, quiz, and follow-ups down to the most granular level.
Our intuitive dashboards provide a clear picture of your best-performing calls-to-action. You can use these insights to A/B test your sales enablement content, personalize your offers and upsell more effectively.
The result?
You discover brand-new revenue opportunities and maximize the lifetime value of every lead…
All because you gave away your book for free!
Turn your free book into a business growth engine with ScoreApp
Giving away your book for free might look like losing revenue in the short term, but the long-term benefits can transform your business.
When you leverage your book effectively and position it as a lead magnet, you position yourself as an industry authority, build relationships, and drive real revenue growth.
Pair a free book with ScoreApp’s quiz marketing software as a strategic tool to generate leads, deepen engagement, and create new sales opportunities.
Our lead generation software has been built to turn curious readers into book lovers who are desperate to work with you! We have hundreds of quizzes, results, and landing page templates to help you start promoting your book in minutes.
Then, follow up with content that educates and inspires.
We have a Learning Center and library of all the resources, swipe files, and frameworks you need to create email marketing journeys, social media posts, and video mini-courses that promote your free book and bring you new leads on repeat.
Best of all, you can try out our quiz marketing software for free!
What are you waiting for?
Get started today and find out how powerful promoting your free book with ScoreApp can be!
