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| Hearsay: |
Get rich quick by giving your product away. Freeing your books on the web, Doctorow-style, is good for you. If you love something, let it go, and if it doesn’t return, you were never any good to start with and should never pick up a pen again in your life. The World Wide Web: literature’s Simon Cowell.
Thinking about it, giving away free digital copies of books makes a lot more sense that giving away free digital copies of music. Downloading a couple of chapters allows you to see how much you might like an author unknown to you. The point being that most of us who like what we read are then likely to go on and purchase the physical copy of the book, because so few of us have the stamina to read an entire book from a screen. Whereas music downloads, free or paid-for, are conveniently portable and these days more and more preferred to traditional media.
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January 31st, 2008 at 8:24 pm
I used a somewhat similar idea when I put a collection of my work on Lulu; the book itself is available in both print and download versions for a small price, but most of the individual stories and essays in it are free. The only exception is a piece I wrote about what I saw on September 11th, 2001, and all proceeds from that download, as well as one dollar from the sale of every print and digital copy, go to the United Way New York City.
Overall, I’ve very much enjoyed my experience. People continue to sample the downloads, and some certainly go on to buy the book. Either way, though, people are reading, and that’s what counts.
February 1st, 2008 at 9:02 am
What you say is very intersting. I started my blog as a way to generate interest for my books. Writing it has become a pleasant comuplsion the way scratching a scab sometimes is. Can’t say that it’s helped book sales though. I’ve got a new one (a novel The Violets of Usambara from Cormorant Books) due in March, with another up for the fall (The Walkable City: From Haussmann’s Boulevards to Jane Jacobs Streets and Beyond, Véhiculle Press) and maybe giving away some of my “interesting” thoughts will encourage people to read them.
It’s a gamble, though, and the temptation to waste time in the blogosphere is ENOMRMOUS.
Mary