Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
This reality is fine, if you happen to be an established author that makes his living off of printed books. Those of us who embrace the e-book as a legitimate format in its own right, disdain paper for its wasteful and limiting physical properties, and don't have Big Publishing backing us up, don't benefit too well from the examples of printed authors.
Following your "reality" will only doom indie authors to obscurity, while maintaining the status quo of Big Pub and holding back an industry that needs to evolve to the new era.
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Indie authors can never really fail as in the digital era they will always have an avenue of publication and always have the opportunity to be read by someone.
I'm not sure how you can "doom" to obscurity that which is already in obscurity. But as we're talking about file sharing, I can't see how exposing yourself to a possible audience of tens of millions, as you would through file sharing, could ever be a bad thing. If we again go by the Golden rule of 5% (as most of the free escalating to premium cost websites use) you're still quite likely to come out ahead, whoever you are.
Have you not considered experimenting with that model? Releasing your next book for free on the torrent sites, Feedbooks and elsewhere and seeing if it drives up sales of the rest? You could always do it for a limited time and then replace the pricing if you didn't like the results.