Quote:
Originally Posted by BexBits
I have found several I really enjoyed but I do insist on a sample. To be honest, I prefer to have the first thing I read be an entire work and free. If the author doesn't offer the book itself for free I'll read a short story or novella to get a sense of how well they write.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by scveteran
I can see saying that you would like to check out the author's work at a library. I would disagree with the idea that the author should need to give some of works free of charge before people buy their works. Seems too much like a sense of entitlement to me.
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Insisting on seeing an unknown's work before buying any isn't a sense of entitlement, just one way to discover their worth.
Truth is most people require some clue that they could like someone's work before they buy it. With the mass market, reviews, recs, publishers etc perform functions to provide that clue. For indies (which is mostly where self promoted titles come from), there's so little exposure that reviews and recommendations (and library copies) will be fewer and farther between, so that author needs to find some other way to prove their worth to readers. It would be a sense of entitlement for an author to think they didn't need to find a way to fill that void, and people should just buy their content with no assurances.
Sampling isn't the only way, but whatever the method, there's a void to be filled, and it isn't a reader's responsibility to fill it.