Personally, I've been trying a variety of approaches. I have 16 books available in ebook format, all originally published in print. Some appear through the original publisher, some through E-reads (a secondary publisher), some self-repubbed indie-style, and some (at times) for free. I have a Paypal donation button on my website, put there when I had a significant offering of free titles. My publisher has never complained about the Paypal button.
The donation model was a mixed success. Certainly a very low percentage of people who downloaded came back with donations. But some did, and some were quite generous in their support. Over a couple of years, I probably received a couple thousand dollars in donations. This is absolutely welcome, and helpful. That said, what's even
more helpful is for people to tell their friends, write good reviews, etc.
I do recognize that the publisher deserves some of the credit for the value of those books, and the best way I can think of to share what I've received in donations is to write the very best next book for them that I can. Someone said that the man-hours a publisher contributes to a book are about the same as the man-hours the author contributes, and that's not even remotely true, at least for me. Still, all those contributions
are real--the editing, the art, the production, etc. Please don't dismiss them.
I've cut back on the free books (I still have a couple), and on the books that I'm repubbing myself, I've gone the low-cost model. That seems to pay better than the free-donation model, though the sales patterns have been highly erratic--highly encouraging in the first quarter of this year, and highly discouraging in the second quarter.
So hey, if any of you have liked my books and would like to post favorable reviews in any of the ebook stores, that would be a
great way to pay the author!
