When I deleted a lot of old Free and Sale Kindle Book posts, I accidentally deleted this one as well. I am reposting it because I think it is still helpful. If you have any suggestions to add, let me know.
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Since I am going to cut way back on my blogging for the short term, I thought I would post about where I find free kindle books.
Because Amazon made some changes to their affiliate programs a many websites or bloggers have cut back on their free books. But I also think free books have declined in popularity. Last year I averaged about 4000 free book “˜purchases’ a month. This year I am averaging about 2000.
There are three main types of sites. The first is the Christian focused Kindle blog sites. The three best of those are GospelEbooks, which posts daily in the morning. Usually not more than one or two free books a day. Vessel Project is similar but often posts once in the morning and once at night. The third is Thrifty Christian Reader, which is run by Chris Smith of the Englewood Review of Books. These posts are more occasional and run a bit more literary. (Update: Chris Smith has really started increasing his posts and even includes sale print books occasionally.)
The second type is the general free kindle book blogs. A lot of them have shut down and the only reliable one I know of is ereaderiq. You can have it send a daily email (the others above do this as well) focused just on your interest. But this requires that the books are properly categorized by the author or publisher. Ereaderiq is also the best place to track prices of books. This is the link for religious books (not all Christian). Ereaderiq is also the best place to track the price of non-free books.
The third type is the publisher free book links, social media accounts or emails. Usually these are a mix of free and sale ebooks because publishers need to make money. David C Cook has 4 or 5 free books a week, usually for only one to two days. Baker Publishing usually has 10 to 20 for a month at a time (this includes Baker, Baker Academic, Bethany House and Revell.) Destiny Image has an email. Others may have occasional sales which you might be able to find via official publisher social media sites.
Another option which is mostly independent authors is NoiseTrade Books. The format of NoiseTrade books can be a problem. Choose Mobi if available because that is a variant of the kindle format and can be read directly. PDF can be read, but often has wonky formatting. Epub can’t be directly read, but you can use Calibre to convert it.
Also don’t forget to try Amazon’s best selling lists, which are different for free and paid ebooks and you can drill down by pretty specific category.
Another place for free books if you are willing to do the work are books for review sites. There are several of these, HarperCollins Christian (Zondervan, Thomas Nelson, HarperOne) have BookLookBloggers, and there are two large general sites, Netgalley and Edelweiss. I have used all three and think there are advantages to each. But personally I am at the point where I want to read what I want to read. However, if you are interested in one of these blog for books programs and need some place to post your reviews, let me know and we can talk through if Bookwi.se might be a place for you to post.
There are a few other random places I get free ebooks, but the vast majority are from one of these.