Quote:
Originally Posted by Taylor514ce
I understand this, but that's not what TOR was doing. They've stated repeatedly that the promotion was for the new tor.com blog site, which doesn't provide books in any form. You're making an assumption that they were really going for more paper book sales. Probably a correct assumption, but they've stated differently.
|
I was answering the question of why they were giving away
e-books if e-book readers were not their target audience, which had been asked a couple of posts prior to mine. The fact that they were promoting the blog was implicit in the question, or at least I thought it was: even to promote something non-e-book-related, why would they give out free e-books if they didn't think their audience
wanted e-books. No matter what you're promoting with freebies, the promotion won't work if people don't
want the freebies.
Although they didn't come right out and say it, I have little doubt that promoting the sale of their print books was a strong secondary rationale for the promotion, just from the way they picked mostly first-in-series titles to give away. As Flint stated early in the Free Library days, the entire Honor Harrington series received a sales boost in print from Baen originally giving away just the first one as an e-book. And Tor and Baen have been historically close, so it does not seem at all unreasonable that Tor was paying attention.
Yes, it's an assumption, but a reasonable one, and it answers the question.