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Originally Posted by lilac_jive
By the way, thanks for uploading your books  I've got it downloaded, now I just have to get to it  |
You're very welcome. I hope you enjoy them!
But to spin that toward the present topic, my reason for doing that was to introduce the books to an audience that didn't know them, and it certainly has worked at least with some of the readership here. But if we were analyzing the process as if looking at a publisher's bottom line, we'd just have to say, well, it's an investment in publicity and promotion, and we hope it'll pay off one day in book sales. But we can't prove it by present returns.
Oh, what the hell--I'll give some numbers.
My free offering of the Chaos Chronicles has brought in a few hundred dollars in Paypal donations--and I thank everyone who's kicked in a contribution. It's a welcome thank-you. But if that alone represented the return I was looking for, I'd do better joining the people holding out cans at the traffic light. Fortunately, it doesn't; my main purpose was outreach.
But what about my commercial ebook editions, which are intended to make a profit? Well, some of them have been available on fictionwise and elsewhere for years (for under $9), and they have yet to earn me a nickel. (That is to say, the earnings have not yet paid off my share of the production costs.) That's not such a good picture.
I hope and expect that this will change, or I wouldn't be continuing to put books up. But at the same time, I'd like folks to realize that putting out ebooks, even when you do it right, is still pretty much a business gamble on a market that's still small.