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| Hearsay: |
Cory Doctorow is the PETA of ebooks. Opening the cages and setting them free!
Booksellers – I’m a former one myself – know that personal recommendations from friends are the best way to sell books – better than reviews, better than covers, better than store-placement. A publisher’s publicity and marketing for a book is an excellent way to get it into some readers’ hands, and the word of mouth enabled by freely copyable ebooks then acts as a force-multiplier to expand the publisher’s efforts. Whether your “natural” audience is small or large, free downloads generally expand it, by letting readers make informed guesses about who else will like it, and giving those readers a persuasive tool for closing the sale.
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August 18th, 2009 at 10:05 am
“Whether your “natural” audience is small or large, free downloads generally expand it…”
Generally?
Last year there was a lot of publicity around the free give-away of the book, “Beautiful Children,” and also of Pasha Malla’s “The Withdrawl Method.” It’s impossible to say how many books would have been sold without those give-aways, but it would be interesting to know what sales are like.
Sometimes I think the only example Cory Doctorow ever uses is Cory Doctorow and I’m not sure if what applies to young adult fiction also applies to adult fiction.
August 18th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Cory Doctorow’s example conclusively demonstrates that if you give your books away for free as part of a general campaign of activism and media whoredom, your notoriety will make you a living from things other than writing.
As long as you do it first, that is.
August 21st, 2009 at 7:34 am
You know what should be free? Cheap, ill-formed opinions spawned by privilege. Yet the Guardian seems to keep buying them at a high price.