Vacation Time

Hi-

 I am on vacation and don't have a blog for you today. I'll be back next month.

Until then,

Have a wonderful May!

Ann Roth
www.annroth.net

APRIL WINNER!!!!

CONGRATULATIONS linda s! You’re the April winner. To receive your free autographed books please contact Cathy McDavid and Tanya Michaels through their Web sites.

To enter the contest simply leave a blog comment and your name will go into the drawing. Simple and painless. And FREE BOOKS.

Free books? Hmm....

Once in a while, as a special promotion, Harlequin gives away books. This helps bring in new readers, so I’m told, although I don’t recall any of my books being part of such a promotion.

Whether to offer books for free—for a short period—is a topic of much discussion among authors. When we reissue our older books or self-publish new ones in ebook format, we do our own promotion, and that involves making decisions. Frankly, I find the idea of giving away my books scary.

Here are the drawbacks:

• Readers who paid for a book, even if it’s only 99 cents or $2.99, may be offended.
• Readers might refrain from buying a book in the hope that it will be given away.
• Some readers get the mistaken idea that because a book is free, that means the rights to the book are public. Piracy is a big enough problem already! 

However, there are advantages to offering a free download for a limited time:

• It draws in new readers for other books.
• It bumps a book higher in the Amazon search engines. Since more people can find it, more copies sell even after it’s no longer free.
• Because there are no printing or shipping charges, the author can do readers a favor with no direct expense. 

 I’ve decided to try an experiment. I won’t do this with many books (definitely not with my half-dozen Regency romances, which are my biggest sellers), but today, May 1, through Thursday, May 3, Amazon will be offering By Leaps and Bounds for free. Here’s the quick pitch:

She used to be a ballerina…

At the height of her success, Kerry Guthrie’s career was cut short by an accident. Now she’s on her feet again, teaching young dancers and hoping for a comeback…until she butts heads with the policeman father of her 15-year-old star student, and feels a new kind of spark.

If you’d like to read By Leaps and Bounds, you can download it free at By Leaps and Bounds Amazon. Don’t own a Kindle? You can download a free app for your computer, iPad or Android tablet, or smartphone here: Free Kindle App.

By the way, while reading on a phone sounds ridiculous, I’ve been glad to have my app when I was unexpectedly stuck somewhere with nothing to read.

 Will this be worth it? Will I regret it? We’ll see! Meanwhile, if you haven’t read By Leaps and Bounds, I hope you’ll give it a try. Thanks!