so last fall i somehow stumbled upon instafreebie and things slowly snowballed out of control from there and now i’m just drowning in free books all the time. not the worst problem to have for sure. and they’re ebooks so they take up virtually no space! anyway i thought i’d put together a list of all the resources i’ve found over the past several months in case anyone is interested. Yes, the quality varies, but honestly you can say that with ‘best seller’ books as well and some free series i’ve found are actually really good.
book rebel – this one is relatively new and i only joined it maybe a month or so ago but i’ve already downloaded a few books they’ve shown me. after you sign up you tell them the genres you are interested in and which sites you buy books from and they will send you a new list of popular free or reduced price books every day. i’ve noticed that this one has more 99c books than actually free but it’s a good resource nonetheless.
cheap thrills books – scroll down a little bit on the page to sign up. this one also sends you an email every day with free and reduced price books. there are usually at least two free ones and all of them are under $4. oftentimes there are boxsets as well. most of the book are mystery/thriller but there are some good scifi/fantasy ones in there as well.
daily free books – this is by far the largest and most comprehensive one i’ve found. you can sign up and pick up to 15 genres to track, meaning that every day you will get an email telling you all the new free ebooks in that genre. you can also just browse the site to see ALL the free ebooks they have and there is a ‘top rated’ category as well, in case you’d rather not take a chance on something that only has like two reviews. i’ve found entire series for free through this site because often an author will make the first novel free one week then the second free the next and things like that, so if you keep a close eye on it you can really snag some good stuff.
instafreebie – this site will send you an email every weekday with 3 featured books in a certain genre [monday is romance, thursday is YA, etc] and will also link you to giveaways where several authors are listing free books all on one page that usually fit a certain theme. every time you download a book from instafreebie you are signed up for the author’s newsletter, but you can easily unsubscribe if you don’t want your inbox to get too cluttered. if you like the author and they don’t send a ton of emails i would recommend keeping the subscriptions though because often they will offer exclusive freebies and ask for beta readers through their newsletter, as well as linking you to free / on sale books by other authors. the prolific reader currently lists 300+ books you can download from instafreebie if you aren’t sure where to start.
library thing – this one is a little bit different than the others i’ve listed so far because they give away review copies which means you actually need to read and review them on their website. every month they give away a certain number of copies of several books in their early reviewer section so you aren’t guaranteed to get one but i’ve only been doing it for a few months and i’ve got every book i’ve requested. really the trick is to pick something that sounds good but also has a lot of copies or not many requesters. there’s also the member giveaway section [top left, under the logo], where there are other giveaways that don’t run on a monthly basis, and i’ve gotten a few books from there so far as well.
netgalley – this site also does review copies. once you make an account you’ll want to go to the read now section and get some books from there, because you can read them immediately without having to be accepted by the publisher. once you have read several books in this section [and linked your goodreads and amazon review pages in your bio] you can start requesting books from other sections to read. another catch with netgalley is that you have to read the books before they are ‘archived’, usually on or shortly after the publication date, and also that the files you download are only good for a certain amount of time before they expire and you can’t view them anymore. also some publishers [like tor] won’t accept you if you don’t have a book blog, but don’t worry there are still a lot of books you can get just by reviewing on goodreads and amazon.
reading addicts – this one sends you a weekly email with free and 99 cent books. it’s basically like the ones i listed at the beginning except it’s once a week instead of every day.
seriously you can get so many free books this way i’ve got literally hundreds that i have yet to read and i download new ones every day. you’ll never run out of things to read. these are all the ones i use currently but i’d love to hear about others that i’ve missed!
note: i have signed up for edelweiss but it’s such a confusing site that i haven’t really done anything with it yet, so if anyone has some guides on what is going on over there i’d love to see them. it looks to have a lot of overlap w/ netgalley but i know a lot of people say they get denied on NG but approved on EW and vice versa so maybe something to check out.
I-want-my-IWTV 