Plus, let's be honest: "Read my book" really means "Buy my book."
If he only cared about people reading it he would've posted it online for free reading.
(Maybe at a fanfic site.
)
Goodkind is an author, a Professional Writer.
As in: "gets paid for his work".
It means he gets to negotiate a price for his work, regardless of what somebody else thinks is "honorable", even to "only allow a select few to read".
It means he is also a businessman.
Everybody involved in *serious* business understands that not only can you *not* reach every last potential customer, it is *foolish* to even try.
Smart businesses identify their target/likely customer and do everything they can *reasonably* do to reach out to them and they do not fret overmuch over potential customers. It is about profits, not market share, to put it bluntly. Many a venture has tanked in the foolish pursuit of profitless market share.
In this exercise, Goodkind started by choosing to self-pub.
That right there "lost" him a lot of potential readers.
Then he set a price. (US$8.99, not $0.99 or $2.99, and definitely not $12.99-14.99. That is a statement right there.)
Once he did that he automatically excluded another large chunk of potential readers.
By going primarily ebook, for now, he excluded another large chunk.
Just as by writing in english (no translation on this one) and writing a fantasy also "excludes" potential readers. It's all part of the business plan. And the business plan starts with what you can reasonably afford to do. Pre-printing a hundred thousand copies and shipping them on spec to a few thousand locations is not something he was prepared to do just yet. Just as commisioning spanish or german translations isn't somehing he's doing yet. Those things are not part of his business plan. Yet. (Ventures grow and they expand. Time will tell where this ends.)
Goodkind has a business plan and that plan isn't about looking for readers; he is looking for buyers.
The experiment here is seeing how much revenue his name and product can bring him without the assistance of his traditionalist publisher.
It really isn't all that different from an author with a contract with one trad pub, releasing a book with a different trad pub. Some authors have simultaneous contracts running with diferent publishers and that doesn't usually make news.
Someday soon, hopefully, a (somewhat) prominent traditionally published author doing self pub on the side *won't* be news.
Someday.
For now, though, it *is* news and it is an exercise worth tracking.