The Internet has changed the potential reading landscape. I agree with J.A. Konrath, most traditional readers aren’t going to go for an e-book, free or otherwise. It’s not really the traditional readers that we’re going after. We’re trying to bring in the new breed of readers, which is growing much faster while the traditional readership declines. We, as authors, need to find some way to pull in these readers. This is one possible way to do it. I’m not saying it will work, but it’s worth a shot. Certainly better than not going after these potential readers at all.

Anyone who blogs is giving away their words for free. Does that mean that the author of the blog, by definition, places no value on the words? I hope not.

“As far as Cory Doctorow goes, I’m familiar with him and his work.

“Regarding the issue of giving the ebook away for free, I think it is a complex issue. Even Cory admits he has no way of knowing if it is helping book sales or not. He’s the editor of a very popular blog aimed at people who are likely to be sci-fi readers (his genre). So who is to say the popularity of his books are due to the act of giving the books away or the promotion of the fact on the blog?

“I guess it is hard to figure out where the value is for a novel if the author places no value on it by giving it away. Cory argues in the article that by doing this he’s “building an audience”, but an audience for what? People who don’t think enough of his writing to pay him - that is, by his own admission, the bulk of the people who download the ebook?”

Walt, a stranger!

Check it out at http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2007/03/more-on-ebooks.html#links

It should spell out in your contract what rights you have given to the publisher. If your publisher is doing ebooks, then that’s probably in your contract. As I mentioned in the interview, my publisher isn’t in the ebook business and my contract with them is only for the exclusive right to publish my book in paperback and hard cover.

You might be right that it would be best to write some books that you sell and some books that you give away. If I had that much time to write, I’d probably take that route. But writing is not my primary job. It’s really just what I do for fun. Which is why I really don’t mind giving my book away. I just want it to be read.

I’d note that my book had been out for over a year and a half before I made it available for free in electronic form. I’d sold a fair share of books but still wasn’t making any real money off of it. Certainly not enough to make up for the money I spent on marketing it. And sales have pretty much slowed to a trickle. So I just didn’t really feel like I had much to lose and everything to gain by releasing it as a free e-book.

I’m curious to see if it works, too

“I’ve been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money.

“When my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor Books in January 2003, I also put the entire electronic text of the novel on the Internet under a Creative Commons License that encouraged my readers to copy it far and wide. Within a day, there were 30,000 downloads from my site (and those downloaders were in turn free to make more copies). Three years and six printings later, more than 700,000 copies of the book have been downloaded from my site. The book’s been translated into more languages than I can keep track of, key concepts from it have been adopted for software projects and there are two competing fan audio adaptations online.”

However, what I do is self-publish free ebooks that I do give away. I have them distributed in places that allow free ebooks and I have at least three people a day requesting either that one or one of the four other ebooks that my writing group and I wrote and published ourselves.

Does it help with sales of your paid-for books? I’d like to think it does. It certainly can’t hurt. So, instead of giving away your book, why not just write another book, put it in ebook format and give that away instead?

I’m telling you, people are frugal and if you give away your book in electronic format, even though they love the work, I’m not sure they’re going to buy the print version. However, they may buy another one of your books as a result.

So why not just write another book and put that one out as your freebie…that way it will entice these people to buy your paid-for book and no one is out any money? Even if you have money to burn, I still think this might be the better route to go. Who knows…I’d be curious to see if it does work, though. ;o)