Pricing - tough choices

I received a note from Amazon Digital Publishing the other day that they discovered that my book, For Sale in Palm Springs was available for free at another book sellers. That's right Amazon. I made the book free at Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and Diesel. Why? Because those platforms are not as popular as the Kindle and I was hoping to stir interest in the series by making the first book free. The second reason that I made it free is because I could. That's right, my distributor Smashwords has a $0.00 price option. Amazon does not. But, now that they have discovered that I give that book away at those site, they have decided to follow suit. What does that do to "sales"? Well, so far this month more than 3,500 copies have been downloaded. Wow! So how do you follow that up? Well, I decided to reduce the price of my other 4 books to $0.99 (minimum price on Amazon.) That means that on each book that Amazon sells I will receive $0.35. Y'all need to buy a lot of books in order for me to be able to pay for the electricity to power my computer that I use to write these. But then I read that some woman in San Francisco is earning $10,000 per month from selling books at $0.99. I'm going to have to buy one to discover her secret.