Quote:
Originally Posted by Falbe Publishing
Sometimes I wonder if charging a $1 for the first book would be better. That way I would only be dealing with people actually willing to pay as opposed to the strictly free crowd, but I have yet to experiment with that.
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Well, Baen Books has been doing pretty well with giving away the first book (or several books) completely free. They seem to know what they're doing.
I think
any price is a barrier for someone who might or might not want to sample a new author. It's not just the $1 price -- it's the whole process of actually giving that dollar to you that's problematic. Deciding to buy the book, setting up an account to buy it with, filling out forms, going through the checkout process, paying for it (which may require someone wearing pajamas to go find his pants and wallet), downloading it ... that's a lot of steps someone has to go through, several of them giving him a chance to back out before actually handing over the money, in order to read that sample book. If you were selling books from a table in a SF con dealers' room, that would be different; someone hands you a buck, you hand them a book, and it takes about 30 seconds. It's an impulse purchase. In the case of the ebooks, the actual amount of money involved isn't as much of a barrier as the inconvenience of the purchase process.
With Baen, you just go to the Baen Free Library, find your book, pick your format, and download it. No barriers. No five-minute process. No forms. No easy opportunities to back out. Their goal is to get sample books into the hands of prospective readers as quickly and efficiently as possible, so those readers can start reading while the impulse is on them.
If they think that's worth doing with books by some of the top authors in the field, I suspect it's probably worth doing for everyone.
As far as dealing with the people willing to pay versus the strictly free crowd:
How is that to your benefit? If the latter aren't going to pay for the book at any price, under any circumstances, then you're not losing a sale by giving them the book free. They wouldn't have bought it anyway. But maybe some of them
might decide to buy the other books. Then you've gained a sale. So you can't lose, and you might win ... that sounds promising to me.
I'm one of the "tasters". I want to find out what a book and author are like before I plop down any money for it. In a brick-and-mortar store, I can read the first few pages -- or, sometimes more important, a random few pages in the middle. If Border's charged me a dollar each to thumb through a book ... well, they wouldn't sell me a lot of books. I don't know you from Adam. I don't know if you write like Isaac Asimov or Cherie Gierak. And I'm not going to pay a dollar (and five minutes of my time in the checkout) to find out.
Now, if you gave away the first one free, sold the others for $3 each, and had a bundle of all four, a short story or two, and some author's notes or something, for $10, you'd probably sell a bunch of the $10 bundles. People like thinking they're getting a package deal.