Quote:
Originally Posted by WFT
(1) If The Pirate Bay is what drove Coelho's sales, why is it necessary for me to offer my e-book for free in order to gain the "free e-book" benefit of The Pirate Bay? As you pointed out, they'll tend to pirate it anyway. Why does it follow that I need to offer my e-book for free in order to gain that benefit?
|
Author support of the free ebook helps; there are people who won't pirate books, and others who will download but not share, if they think the author (and attached publishers lawyers) might come after them. Whether or not you directly offer it for free, a public announcement of "I'm not worried about free copies" works as a promotion.
Quote:
|
(2) What do you think of the alternative that smashwords.com and others offer of giving away the first portion of an e-book for free? In other words, give readers a chance to sink their teeth into it, then require them to pay to see the rest of the story. What do you think of that alternative?
|
I think that's lovely, and a very viable option. The biggest concern I'd have about it, is people downloading the sample, reading & enjoying it, and not taking the time to get back to Smashwords to buy the rest of it. (I'm in that spot on one book, and have two more samples in my Reader that keep getting bumped for more immediate works.) I haven't checked to see if the samples end with "If you liked this, go to [URL] and buy the rest of the book."
Many people with Kindles speak highly of their sampling system; it lets them try books they'd normally never consider. And it avoids one of the costs of buy-first ebooks: if they hated it, they won't tell friends "I wasted $6 on that author!"
Quote:
|
(3) Do you see a downside to giving away free e-books?
|
There's an obvious downside to free ebooks as opposed to sold ebooks (you get paid for sold ebooks but not free ones), but it's not clear whether that's likely to be balanced by extra print sales. It is known that you can't estimate print sales, nor potential ebook sales, by looking at free download numbers.
Free ebooks are more advantageous to authors of multiple books, or those with political causes to support, because ebook popularity will spill over into other activities, at least somewhat.
Downsides:
Many people think that free ebooks are low-quality gimmicks, like many other free & promotional products; you'll be working against the assumption that anything free is worth what you paid for it.
Having free copies available damages your ability to get it picked up by a major publisher. (Not sure if that's important to you, but it's part of the package.)
Free ebooks means less data about your readers: you won't know who they are, and won't have a way to get good info about how to market your physical book. And even if you demand registration & an email address to download, if it's free, people will share it. (And bugmenot.com will offer free registrations, so you'll get no data from that.)
Advice:
Study the rhetoric used to explain the Baen free library, and how they give away ebooks to make money.
Read some anti-DRM rants. (You may already have, in which case, find some at different sites. The anti-fair-use-restrictions rants have a different flavor from the computer-glitch-killed-my-purchase rants.) The DRM argument is tangential, but the issues are very connected to pricing issues. (Especially since a large part of most ebook pricing is paying for the DRM software.)
Read some pro-DRM rants, or arguments, or whatever they're called.
While authors may not consider it their job to understand a dozen ebook formats (which I think is a mostly reasonable belief), they do need to understand DRM, for the same reason they need to understand hardcover vs paperback, or the difference between selling a story to an anthology or to a magazine. There's a
drastically different market involved, and even if one category of that market is of no interest to them, they need to know it exists, and have some idea about what's involved with it.