Quote:
Originally Posted by WFT
So I guess I'm saying that I'm intrigued by the claim, but I'd like to see more factual evidence. If I can find enough to convince me, I'd put my ebook out for free while trying to sell my print book.
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It's hard to find solid numbers, but poking around here will tell you that every ebook is definitely NOT a lost print sale, which seems to be what the mainstream publishers believe. Free ebooks don't always generate notable numbers of paper sales, especially for less-well-known authors, but they can't be shown to hurt.
For myself, I don't read print at all anymore. I get frustrated with the physical book (it doesn't stay open with one hand), and annoyed that I can't carry it with me easily... so for books I want to read that don't exist in e-format, I'll cut the bindings off, scan & OCR them. (This is rare; I'll only do this for books I really, REALLY want to read. Mostly I skip them and move to something else.)
So for me, a free ebook is a book I don't have to buy. Yay for me; not such good news for you. However it's not a missed print sale, because I wasn't going to read it in paper format anyway. And if I like the book, I might buy the paper version as a gift, and I'd certainly be happy to recommend it to friends.
I'm in a niche group. (This niche is over-represented here at MR; there are plenty of people here who've given up entirely on paper. These aren't, however, the majority book buyers; not even the majority of ebook buyers.)
About Smashwords:
If you offer your book "free" at Smashwords, you can set it to "pay what you like." Most of the downloads will be free, but some conscientious readers will return to pay something after they've read & enjoyed the book.
And it's likely the formatting problems come from auto-conversions of Word docs or similar, which haven't been formatted for ebooks. While they don't have a way to allow you to upload your own ebooks (yet), it's possible you can get good conversions by getting advice on how to format the Word (or whatever) document first. Starting with an HTML file that's properly tagged for easy ebook conversion (styles, headings, table of contents, etc.) should fix most of the problems.