When you’re addicted to reading like I am, you can spend a lot of hard-earned cash buying books. Or you can find your next read in other ways – also like me. Here are my faves for e-books.
My local library and their online lending app Libby. When I want a bestseller, I’ll likely have to put the book on hold for some time before it’s available, but it will be free when my turn comes! And for books on paper or print, I visit my library’s fundraising sales once or twice a year. Okay, those aren’t quite free, but when you can walk out with a shopping bag of new-to-you titles for $10 and know you’re supporting the great things your library does? How do you beat that?
Struggling authors (like me) use book promotion sites to get our books out in the world, and you can pick up some excellent books – free or substantially discounted. All you need to do is subscribe to their site. You can usually also narrow down the genre that interests you most, and the site will send you an email with a list of free or discounted books. I’ve read many excellent books I’ve found on these sites – and a few dogs. But for free, it’s often worth weeding out a little chaff. Here are my favorites:
Bookbub is the granddaddy of them all – and where you’re more likely to find discounted rather than free ebooks. But since the discount price is usually $1.99 – $3.99, it’s still a good deal. Bookbub vets the choices carefully too, so the quality of the books I find there is often quite high.
Hello Books comes out of the UK and happens to be featuring my novel Come Back and more on their free list this weekend. They only promote free books, and they only send out emails on Fridays which means my inbox gets less overrun. Their features stay available for three days too, which isn’t true for most other sites.
The Fussy Librarian, Freebooksy, and Bargain booksy are other sites I use to find new-to-me authors. You’ll likely find more self-published authors on these sites than on Bookbub, so you might have more chaff to weed out to find the gems. But I’d be the last to suggest that self-published in today’s world might mean lower quality. Not at all. The vast majority of self-published books are not what we used to think of as Vanity books. And none of these sites promote books for free, so you can assume that authors take a serious approach to their writing.
There are many other sites that promote free books too – but I only listed my faves.
Enjoy – and please review all the books you read! Drop a few lines on Amazon and other bookselling sites, on Goodreads, and/or let your friends know you loved a book on Facebook! You’ll help other readers find the books you like, and you can trust me on this, you will make an author’s day! What’s more, with your encouragement, that author is likely to sit down at the keyboard and pound out yet another book you’ll want to read. Your reviews mean more than you can possibly imagine, especially to a self-published author (like me!)
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