Forgive my long quote, but:

…What is the writer or musician to do, though, if she can’t earn money from her art? Simple, says the Slashdotter: earn your money playing live (if you’re one of those musicians who plays live),3 or selling T-shirts or merchandise, or providing some other kind of “value-added” service.

[…]
Oh Mr Freetard, you work as a programmer, do you? How interesting. So do you perform all your corporate programming duties for free, and earn your keep by selling personally branded mousemats on the side?

No, you don’t sell mousemats, you sell your services. The software is free, but if some user wants a new feature, you charge for your time writing that feature. I worked for a few years doing just that: I wrote software that I gave away and charged for my time making improvements.

The problem is that the lifestyle sucks. You make X dollars an hour, and that’s it. You can’t rest on your laurels, because you have to keep working to get paid. No benefits. No holidays. Just hand to mouth.

While the free ebook as promo and brand building tool works now in this transition phase, your question, what happens when the majority of book purchases are ebooks? is telling. Are we creating an expectation that such works should be free?

Over the last five years a growing portion of my book acquisitions is by download, and my attitude as a consumer, once I decide I want a story or book, is just to go see where I can download it — for free, for pay, legal, illegal, doesn’t matter.

I once had the chance to talk to Cory Doctorow in person about this topic, and he is persuasive. But when I look at my own habits — I am spending less on books than I used to — I know there’s a catch somewhere.

There is an iTunes equivalent for books, fictionwise.com. Not as elegant as iTunes, some books have really annoying DRM, but some books are free, and you can buy individual short stories or novelas as well. When finding a free version of a book I want proves too difficult, I just go to Fictionwise and plonk down my three or four bucks. I also use it to browse for new stuff I might be interested in.

I don’t think the Slashdot argument is that anyone who is creative (writing/composing/whatever) should be denied payment for their efforts, but simply that those who are going to be the most successful going forward are those that embrace a new business model, rather than continue to cling on by their fingernails to the old one.

The record companies are a perfect example of what happens when you cling on too tightly. At first they tried to pretend the Internet didn’t exist, and then when Napster came along they sat there and just lashed out at anybody that tried to take away their comfort zone. Then they woke up a bit, and at least admitted they needed to do something. But they lock up their songs up with DRM, sue anybody who ever touches a file sharing network, and in one Sony case, install malicious software on your customers computer. This is simply not the way to conduct yourself. Not only is it hugely damaging to their brand, but it also devalues music even further, as those who truly do like the rebellion distance themselves even further from the money grabbing corporate whores the music executives appear to be. The harder the music companies push, the harder it is for them to win back the mindshare.

But some of them are beginning to get it. iTunes was the first real step in actually providing what people wanted, easy access to the songs people wanted. And unlike Napster, you had a 100% chance of actually getting the song you wanted to download, with proper tags, and not an MP3 rip of a song recorded from the radio with a DJ talking in Spanish over the end. Starting to allow DRM-free versions, even in their previously feared MP3 format at Amazon, shows that they have finally realised you should treat your customers as people first, and thieves later; not the other way around.

The lesson from this is that change should not be feared. Grab the internet generation with both hands and use them to your advantage, rather than locking your doors and cowering in the corner with your old business model pressed tightly to your chest, afraid that the mob is coming to steal it from you. For musicians this means giving away a few tracks from your new album for free and selling the rest, with a premium for the higher quality lossless versions. Or selling complete recordings of all your live shows. And using the momentum from this to sell more tickets to your next show (see TMBG and Barenaked Ladies). For writers, this means giving away your last book for free in order to create publicity for the one you’re about to release in hard copy. Or giving away the first couple of chapters for free as an incentive to buy the rest. Or selling your novel one chapter at a time, as you write it (see Stephen King). And if you’re a movie producer, let people download the first 30 minutes of your movie for free and then let them buy the DVD containing the rest of the film direct from your website.

And most importantly, take the feedback from your audience, interact with them, let their word of mouth be your marketing machine and never treat them like criminals. People will be more than happy to pay for your work if the price and terms are fair. At the end of the day these are your customers, and for the first time in human history creative people have the opportunity to truly communicate with those who appreciate their art en mass, and that should be something artists should be excited about, not fearful of.

“writes” should be “writer” in that fourth sentence. =P

But if there’s been a comparable success by a band that hasn’t already gained its cultural capital and name-recognition through the evils of copyright and corporate promotion, I’d like to know about it.

There’s been a few MySpace artists who have built a fan base before releasing via “normal” industry channels and there’s been some other minor success stories. However, I agree: Radiohead and NIN’s foray into free or cheap give-aways were nothing more than publicity stunts. Radiohead’s album isn’t available via their site any more, proving that they saw it as promo only too.

It’s an interesting time… There really doesn’t seem to be a good new business model for any creative distribution over the net, be it for software, music, books or video. It’s either the old way (sell at full price with DRM and punish those who copy) or the new way (give everything away for free and pay the mortgage with your day job, because you will have to keep one).

The best solution as you said is an iTunes model… slightly discounted prices for higher convenience. It stops casual pirates and gives us all a unified distribution point. The benefit is that you’re fighting the bad guys with something that’s positive for your customers. Piracy is only going to get easier though, so the convenience angle won’t last forever, only until pimple-faced coder builds a better piracy app.

…which leaves us in the same place again.

Can we eat if our only source of income is an honesty box? Probably not.

Two more data points that I think are relevant to your ‘lab report’:

1. By the time Trigger Happy was released online, what were its yearly sales numbers, compared to its first year in print?

2. How do the initial sales numbers of Unspeak compare to the initial sales numbers of Trigger Happy?

Dude, virtually NO ONE makes a living writing fiction, on or OFF the internet.

This isn’t about copyright or PDFs or DRM. It’s about, fiction is almost impossible to make a living from.

Most people with hardcover physical books and contracts with major publishing houses are making approximately as much money on their works as you did on yours, which is to say zero for all practical intents and purposes.

So you missed on, what, the $20,000 advance you might have gotten on that book? That would have half been eaten by taxes and a couple thousand more on out of pocket expenses….

And nonfiction books are hardly better. Writers making money tend to work for periodicals, technical publishers, movie studios, tv studios, and even then they tend to feel poorer than everyone around them,

Writer feels miserable and underpaid and is bitter about Something Wrong With Society Or A Subset Thereof, film at 11.

There is a vanishingly small number of writers who make a living writing books of their own choosing (that is, excluding those who have “real jobs” on the side, or who ghostwrite/are ghostwritten).

Given the observed facts, it simply is not reasonable to expect to make a living writing books. Writing press releases, magazine articles, or Simpsons scripts can pay the rent, but books rarely do.

So anyone who invests the large amount of time it takes to craft a decent novel or nonfiction book needs to be doing it for some reason other than money. If your reason is the love of the art, or because you want other people to read what you wrote, then giving away the fruits of your labor is a perfectly reasonable things to do. Given the odds against getting published (and the poor sales for most books which do get published), chances are you’ll be more widely read through a freebie than the traditional route.

On the other hand, if your goal is to be the next J. K. Rowling and earn a billion dollars from your books, then giving them away probably won’t do the trick (though there’s always the movie rights). But if that’s really your goal as a writer, you might want to take a reality pill first thing in the morning.

rate=rare

I feel your pain. Yours is one of the many professions made irrelevant and outdated by progress in technology. You are literally left behind.
But it does not matter what do you feel and how hard it is for you. Just like slave masters would cry seeing as their families are destroyed in the wind of change that took away their only income (slaves working on plantations), same will happen to many professions because of the internet and computers. Many more professions will not die but will be drastically morphed and changed. Like musicians who will have to work much harder than just selling albums. They will have to actually play their music live, and use recordings as a promotional material. Still musicians are the lucky ones. They will remain rich (although not as rich as before)
Ironically that would simply mean returning to the old ways they were living for ages before copyright.

You are taking copyright for granted. But for thousands years writers did not have any copyright protection. In fact it is a technology progress (movable type) that brought such a weird and unnatural thing as copyright into relatively short existence. And now same progress is going to kill it, and return to all people what was taken away from them in 1709. Right to copy everything they see and hear. Right that belongs to every human being. Our copyright.

Let me add a data point for your experiment:

I downloaded your book but did not get a chance to look at it yet. I would not read it as a PDF as I don’t find it convenient and printing it from a PDF is currently more expensive than buying the actual copy.

I would not have used your paypal button because I don’t have a paypal account and I don’t want to have one.

And a few remarks:

Professional writers used to be paid a lump sum by the publisher for their work. Those publishers created the copyright system to ensure the exclusivity on the published material and prevent copy by other publishers. No digital anything at the time. Alternatively they had sponsors who cared about their legacy.

Finally, as a more general problem, you would have to prove that your position as a professional writer living from the royalties (and that is important because it is very different from the money you earn from the guardian) on your books is more important than accelerating the circulation of knowledge. If you could also throw in a solution for out of print books it would be greatly appreciated.

I think it is important to establish to people that you want to be paid. The idea that people will pay for things that are being “given away”, goes against everything they have learnt in their day to day lives.

The next time you try this you should give people a price. Make it fair and make it clear that it is what the book cost. Format the book so the last page has not only the ending but a request to be paid if the reader has enjoyed your work. If you made it clear when they downloaded it that you expected to be paid. I doubt it will be an issue for any one that finishes the book.

I don’t know about “comparable success”, but Jonathan Coulton is someone that has achieved a good deal of success without corporate promotion. Is he as rich as the two bands you mentioned? No. Is he able to make a good living off his work? Yes. He talks about it in an episode of TWIT (http://www.twit.tv/133). One of the things he made clear from the start was that he expected to be paid for his work.

Great article and great comments. As is argued by several other commenters, the “professional writer” is rapidly becoming an extinct animal. This will have some effect on the face of literature, perhaps we should expect shorter works… There will be winners and losers but I doubt scholarship and the arts will be much worse off.

Analogously for music, the album as a genre and the three minute pop song no longer have their reason for being in the record and the radio. Is the quality of music deteriorating? How many times in history have we heard the refrain that culture is in decline?

The existences of Wikipedia and the conversation of the blogosphere are evidence that the role of the solitary writer as the fountainhead of intellectual production is not only historically contingent but inessential.

I only just found this site (via Daring Fireball), and I haven’t had a chance to look at your work yet. I can tell you I wouldn’t have sent you money, simply because I refuse to do business with PayPal. Too many things can, and do, go wrong with PayPal.

If you want people to give you money, you have to make it easy for them to do so. No one is going to give you money if it’s a hassle, or a risk, and they’re not obligated to do it.

Sadly, there’s not many good alternatives. Traditional credit-card processing imposes prohibitive fees on the vendor.

I’ve downloaded a few non-DRM e-books. It’s more convenient than leafing through the first chapter of a book in Barnes and Noble. I’ve never read an e-book end-to-end. If the work is good, I buy a hard copy. I’m also a “serial reader” — if I like an author, I tend to go buy as many of their works as I can find.

In particular, Baen’s policy of issuing backlist titles as DRM-free e-books has brought them a lot of my money. I’ve wound up purchasing entire series by authors that I would not previously have picked up off the bookstore shelf. That’s not something that can be easily accounted for with a spreadsheet.

E-books are convenient for some things. I suspect that people like me — the sort of person who can’t leave the bookstore without at least $60 in purchases — are also people who enjoy having the books on the shelf.

As a reader, my advice to authors is: Don’t hold on to the “value” of your work past its natural shelf life. It’s not likely that you’re suddenly going to become such a superstar that your back catalog starts selling again. At some point, it ceases to be a cash cow, and becomes your best advertising. Stop trying to milk it for all its worth. By turning it out to pasture on the Internet, you might lose some royalties. You will gain new readers.

(As for new works, yeah, a sample chapter is nice… but I agree that the “shareware” model is too risky when it’s paying the rent. Go ahead, make me pay for the paper copy… I just ask that you push your publisher, hard, to print the hardcover edition on acid-free stock — and real stock, not tracing paper. Especially if they’re going to ask me for $27 list.)

You know, Denis makes a good point: PayPal still scares some people off. If one could manipulate reality in a science lab, it might be interesting to rerun the experiment, this time adding alternative methods of payment (Amazon tips? More explanation as to the nature of the Make a Donation link?)

You may not be aware of this, you not being a software author (I assume), but downloads definitely do not translate to users. That is, 30,000 downloads doesn’t mean 30,000 people have read the book. Who knows how many actually read it all the way through? It’s definitely a fraction of your total download count. You’re lucky if a quarter of those people keep your software around. I’d assume that, similarly, an author would be lucky if a quarter of those people read past the first chapter. The analogy here is that a lot of people might pick up a book in the bookstore and browse it, but most of them put it back down out of disinterest. I think you need to adjust your expectations accordingly.

Your book also seems to be located in a niche of a niche of a niche: people interested in an academic discussion of video game mechanics as they relate to other things in history. At least, that’s the impression I get from the Amazon reviews. I don’t have time for that sort of other-person’s-navel-gazing, so I haven’t actually read it (or downloaded it).

Other questions you should be asking are: How does 30,000 downloads compare to the bookstore/Amazon sales figures? How much did I make off “tips” versus the bookstore/Amazon take? If I required payment for the book, but charged as much as Amazon does, and kept all the money myself, how much might I make?

The notion that you can’t get paid for professional writing is total bullshit, but you’re going to have step up your game. Write things for a wider audience. Write prolifically. And start with realistic assumptions. There is no free lunch on the Internet, and information may not want to be free, but there is certainly other information out there, so what makes **yours** so compelling?

I find it interesting that the only models that people are considering here are “free” and “paid for by the readers”. What about “paid for by patrons”?

Let’s say you’d like to take in $90,000 from a book, to cover a year of living plus the minimal expenses of distributing online. You could have all 30,000 of your readers paying $3 each, but that will never happen. Okay. What about 3,000 readers paying $30 each. Maybe, if you wrote something that really resonated with people.

But what about 300 people paying $300 each? Now we’re cooking. I would gladly pay $300 a year to support a single author whose work has had a significant effect on my life. Especially if that was my only book-related expense. I pay you $300 a year, and I get every other book in the world for free, because every other author has his own 300 patrons.

What if patronage became an accepted and expected part of the culture, something that people could publicly be proud of? I would see someone reading your book, I would feel the pride of ownership, I would proudly claim, “I sponsored that book!”, and be respected for that…

What if patronage served as a status symbol and a mark of style? People judge me today by my clothing and car, my job and my hobbies, the music I listen to, the goddamn wine I drink. What if I could somehow wear my sponsorships publicly, and be judged on those as well? What if patronage were fashionable?

Getting people to give up the “slashdot world” of FREE STUFF EVERYWHERE is impossible, because it goes against human nature. But paying to make a fashion statement is very much part of human nature. Can we harness that force to support our society’s artists?

I thought that was Harrison Bergeron.

John Scalzi is someone you should talk to about this. He’s participating in the Tor e-books promotion. I can’t speak directly as I’m not a professional writer, but I recall Scalzi saying that downloads appear to generate sales of physical books, both of the title downloaded and also of other titles in his catalog.

He’s already an established fiction writer whose works sit on the shelves in Borders and B&N so your mileage may vary.

Here’s one post from Scalzi that I found quickly:
http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=432
He’s written about the Tor promotion several times, and also about Baen’s similar program.

I do write for a living, but the nature of my work is that I get paid to produce it and that’s it. There is something odd about someone continuing to get royalties for work only done once. Would anyone like to defend that?

Hi,
very interesting conversation.
I think the case for fiction is very different from other type of books, for example tech books : I’ve been quite happy for the “library” model used by O’Reilly’s Safari : pay a monthly subscription, get access to all the books.
I know as a reader I wouldn’t mind a cheap “time limited” access to fiction books : they are currently to expensive, takes too much shelf space (in their physical form), and most of them I won’t re-read anyway…

Perhaps an advertising model for books would work. Authors could find advertisers to sponsor the work, and then the book can feature their message in a callout on every page.

Once you’ve done that, it becomes advantagous to get the book out in front of an audience as fast as you can, and you’re working with the distribution channel not against it.

The question is whether the numbers add up. Anyone know the ad industry enough to give some prices? Perhaps we could compare with magazines.

Note that the adverts also mean that the printed book becomes more attractive to readers as it is ad free.

It’s an interesting, if slightly polarised question, and I think the comments here have more than answered it.

I will say this, though:

I build websites for a living. A good chunk of my day to day work is pure “creative output”. The company I works for gets paid in all of the manner of weird and wonderful ways people pay for sites, whereas I get paid a salary like any average Joe. (And, as it happens, I also write software and build web stuff in my spare hours, some of it open source, some of it not).

I’m increasingly struggling to see the fundamental difference between what I do and what you, or say, a pop artist does. The only difference is that I’m employed to do it and he company I work for deals with (and, if they do it right, profits from) the disparity between monthly salaries and contracted fees and the like. If I chose to go freelance, I’d be in the same boat as you: and guess what? I’d have to churn out new work on a regular basis if I wanted to get paid for it (and, having been there and done that, I can say fairly categorically that it wouldn’t stop me giving away open source stuff, either).

Does that answer the question?

On the patronage front, it’s not quite the kind of thing you’re thinking of, but Calabash are starting an experiment in attempting to combine music, social networking and microfinancing called Tune Your World.

And there was the novel Fay Weldon wrote for Bulgari, though I don’t suppose product placement will be an available option for most writers.

One particular problem the music industry has is that they already sell music DRM-free, on CDs, so it’s harder to persuade people to buy crippled versions of the same files. That doesn’t apply to movies, since all DVDs have copy-protection; it will be interesting to see whether as movie downloading grows, they manage to avoid some of the same problems. But in that sense books are like DVDs: the format they’re sold in at the moment (i.e. paper) is not easily reproducible. You buy one copy, and if you want to share it with a friend you either lend it to them or you buy them their own copy. I think the publishing industry should be very cautious about establishing any kind of precedent that e-books should be any different.

Cory Doctorow is kind of the poster boy for the “new model” of how writers are supposed to make a living. It works if you’re Cory. Not sure how it works for everybody else. I had a long chat with him about this stuff. You can download the podcast (in three chunks of twenty minutes each) from my site wetmachine:

http://www.wetmachine.com/item/486/

When business models change, it’s a bitch. I’ve been a writer, or a manager of writers for a computer or software company, since 1980. I’ve written software and hardware manuals, magazine articles, marketing copy, a novel, novellas, and so on and so forth. I’m currently working as a ghostwriter on a book about software process management. In real terms, my income peaked in 1992 or so.

I believe I was the second person, after Cory Doctorow, to put his or her novels under Creative Commons license. In fact it was that old gadabout Cory himself who convinced me to do it. They’re available at http://www.wetmachine.com

I’m not rich yet.

My first job was with Data General, a giant “minicomputer” manufacturer. That company, and all others in its class are gone. Most recently I worked for Laszlo, makers of OpenLaszlo, a great, free, open source platform. I got laid off after 4.5 years. It’s hard to make money when you give away the product of your labor, whether you’re a person OR a corporation.

I’ve written a bunch of stuff for Salon.com, a fairly well-regarded “new media” outfit. The articles did really well, in terms of how many people downloaded them. I made about $.05/hour for writing them, but they did bring a measure of attention to my books.

All of which is to say that I don’t have any idea how to make a decent living as a writer, but that’s what I’m going to keep doing because I’m old and don’t see anything else that offers a better chance of financial success. At least when you self-publish your books, you can keep selling them indefinitely. And there is always the chance, however slim, that you’ll have some kind of big break-out success, a la J.K. Rowling. Especially if you go out into the world and sell your books in person.

If you see me selling my books from the trunk of my car at a truckstop on the Interstate, do be kind and buy one, won’t you?

I know one example of a writer who makes her living only through writing online. Her biggest work, which I like a lot, is Tales of MU. I was going to write a big description of it here, but I would just be repeating the contents of the link. It is an ongoing story that updates five days a week (usually Monday through Friday), and if a donation goal is met, the writer, Alexandra Erin, writes a bonus story on the weekend. Erin used to have a “normal” job, but then she collected enough donations to support herself with the promise that if she reached a certain amount of money, she would quit her current job and write new chapters more often.

There is another sentence after this one, but for some reason it isn’t showing in the preview (maybe because it contains a second link), so I hope it appears in the actual post. This post in Erin’s blog contains her views and advice on making a living by writing online.

Hm, I actually donated (through a different pseudonym, obviously) – guess I won’t bother next time if you’re going to abuse the idealists.

Hi Steven,

It seems to me that a basic problem is that you’re asking for a payment before people have read the book. If they don’t know your work they don’t know if it’s worth anything. They would be much more likely to pay after they read some of it and realize they like it.

So here is my suggestion. Split the book in two. The first part is free. The second part has a very low minimum price (10 cents?) but they have to type in an actual number and click a few times to get it. The minimum price (plus the effort of completing a transaction) should be just enough so that people who don’t know whether it’s worth anything won’t download both parts at once. A very low minimum makes it clear that they’ll have an easy decision about whether it’s worth that much if they like it even a little bit, and so they might as well download the first part. A minimum of 1 cent might be better than 10 cents for a paypal transaction, since it will be more obvious that this is just saying the value can’t be zero and they have to click through an actual transaction, not that 1 cent is the suggested price.

They then go off and read the first part. If they like it they will come back to get the second part, and those who come back will be ones who feel it’s worth something, so your chances of getting a reasonable donation should be excellent. You might want to word the price description something like, “can’t be zero; your support will help allow me to write more books.”

Incidentally, I would tend to make the first part be most of the book, rather than just a chapter or two. You want them to come back at a point where they’ve concluded that it’s a good book and they should pay for it, not at a point where they’ve merely seen a good premise or some dramatic tease.

Here’s a thought about the donation method:

Suppose I come to your site and downloaded your book, but I don’t leave a tip because I don’t like to pay for something that might suck. Further suppose that I then read it from beginning to end in PDF form. Depending on the length of your book and my reading speed, the elapsed time between me visiting your site and finishing your book could be anywhere from hours to months.

First the (hypthetical) good news: I love the book! I find it to be insightful and useful, and I even plan to refer to it frequently in the future. But here’s the bad news: it’s been weeks since I visited your site, and I don’t have much incentive to go back to it for the purpose of making a donation. Whether that’s because I’m lazy or just forgetful doesn’t matter — there’s a barrier that keeps my money out of your tip jar.

What if, instead, there were a link at the end of the book, embedded in the PDF, that went directly to your donations page? A short paragraph, printed in a larger font than the rest of the book, that says “I hope you enjoyed this book. A lot of work went into writing it, and your donations make it possible for me to continue writing. Click the button below to find out how you can support more books like this one!”

Well that’s a different story! I just finished the book, and with this link sitting right in front of me, I am inspired to donate while my appreciation for the book is still fresh.

I think I’m in agreement with some previous posters when I say that creating an expectation of payment is a good thing, even if you are relying on the honor system. Don’t irritate your readers with constant nagging, but don’t be shy about asking for money either. Make it visible, make it easy, and put it in front of the reader when they are most receptive to the idea.

Bananaranha: I think the long-tail effect only kicks in once you’ve got some recognition in the first place. Gambling on your early works becoming lost gems that the public is willing to pay while you still aren’t earning enough money from your current works to eat properly is a bad bet.

I saw Jonathan Coulton mentioned, and he is my favorite example in the music space of being able to support a family while giving away his primary product. But he’s also a musician and Steven already talked about the difficulty of writers doing live concerts (Although I _did_ pay $50 to go hear David Sedaris read to me.)

I’d like to also point out the Penny Arcade guys (www.penny-arcade.com) as an excellent example of new-technology content producers that searched long and hard for a way to make their craft pay over the internet. Their archive is down at the moment, so I’m having trouble finding some of Tyco’s posts on the pain they went through finding a way to make writing and drawing a thrice weekly comic pay the bills. They’ve ended up with a bit of a juggernaut, though, as they now helm an international charity that raises over a million dollars a year for children’s hospitals and they run one of the largest gaming conventions in North America.

And while Enris said it a bit harshly, I think that the people who wait for the market to dictate a solution to them are going to be less happy (and less compensated) than those willing to find the solution themselves.

I write for love, but I publish for money. — Vladimir Nabokov

Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy. — Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media

If you’re going to write, I think that in many instances you’ll write regardless of whether you’re paid or not. At least now everyone has a printing press (read: weblog), so everyone potentially has an audience. The issue arises in getting people’s attention.

If you’re a really good writer a Real Publisher(tm) will publish your works. If not, you’ll be slogging away and no one will know you. With weblogs, PDFs, and print on demand books you can potentially get people’s attention in an easier and cheaper way than a large marketing budget.

I think downloads are a useful tool in marketing, but it may not wok in all situations. For an author’s first few books, PDFs may actually be necessary to get people interested. There are so many books published each year that it would be impossible to purchase (or even borrow from a library) even a small percentage of them.

Once you’re semi-established, or perhaps if you’re known “ahead of time” through a well-visited weblog, then a sample chapter or two may be enough to wet people’s appetite.

Anyone who’s quite well-known (Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Jane Jacobs, etc.) wouldn’t need to do anything as they have a “fan base” that will pick up any new book and help generate buzz to introduce new readers to the author. As a good-will gesture, it may be a good idea to release a book in electronic form a few years after the first publishing date. If you’re not making a lot on “long tail” sales, then getting people’s attention for future books could be worth more.

For musicians (and perhaps other types of artists), there are other venues to generate income. So while they’re living in obscurity, giving out audio files gets the word out and buzz for their tour. A few links to an online music store (for higher quality files perhaps) could then useful to get some cash. Once they have a bit of a fan base, the ratio between free and paid-for content can be looked at again.

I think each creator needs to determine for themselves how much they want or need to generate publicity versus getting money for every copy (physical or digital) of work that is distributed. Needless to say, it’s the copyright holder’s right to determine how their work is sent out to the world, but in the modern world, making copies (legal and illegal) has become a whole lot easier, so that now has to be taken into account in any decision.

The second you equated copyright with ‘righttoeat’ you lost me as a reader, and I’m sure many others.

You think you have some divine right to live off a crummy aged book about a quickly changing industry?

I wonder if the people who actually can’t eat in countries like ethiopia, or hell, even in the U.S.A feel like if they jot enough words down on paper then they will have fulfilled their duties to society, and will get fed.

My guess is, they don’t

The fact is, most people downloaded it for free because there is virtually NO value attached — for good reason. It’s a novelty item that noone would have wanted if it cost even 5 cents.

Furthermore, this isn’t news. Everyone in the publishing industry understands that you will not sell to certain people. Those people will borrow the book from a friend or library, copy it some other way, or just not read the damn thing.

They never EVER intended to pay for it, so if you have a problem with that then you shouldn’t ante up your bandwidth to these people.

I think you need to find a different industry, or learn to cope with the fact that you are never going to get paid for every reader.

On a busy corner in São Paulo, Brazil, street vendors pitch the latest “tecnobrega” CDs, including one by a hot band called Banda Calypso. Like CDs from most street vendors, these did not come from a record label. But neither are they illicit. They came directly from the band. Calypso distributes masters of its CDs and CD liner art to street vendor networks in towns it plans to tour, with full agreement that the vendors will copy the CDs, sell them, and keep all the money. That’s OK, because selling discs isn’t Calypso’s main source of income. The band is really in the performance business — and business is good. Traveling from town to town this way, preceded by a wave of supercheap CDs, Calypso has filled its shows and paid for a private jet.

The vendors generate literal street cred in each town Calypso visits, and its omnipresence in the urban soundscape means that it gets huge crowds to its rave/dj/concert events. Free music is just publicity for a far more lucrative tour business. Nobody thinks of this as piracy.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/i.....rentPage=5

I don’t have any breakthrough ideas as far as a business model for you goes, but on the subject of:

“I was also, of course, interested in testing the idea of giving stuff away and allowing people freely to express their appreciation”

I think there is a huge number of variables that could impact your results here. You could spend hours crafting a better message to convince people to pay you, for example.

You could look at ways of linking to ebook itself to a payment system, as suggested above.

You could have people leave their email address, and email them a few weeks later saying “did you enjoy the book? Would you like to pay me a few dollars for it”, hoping they have actually read it.

I suspect part of the problem is asking for ‘donations’, which has certain connotations, before people have read the book. It might not be worth paying for. With Radiohead, you already have a good idea what you are getting.

My (long winded) point is that judging the success or failure of the entire idea on this one test might be too hasty. You could have had completely different results with the same book, had your approach been different in some way.

Worth checking out.

It seems obvious to me what needs to be done. Release the DRM-free version in something like Navajo or Esperanto, and if you want the lossless translation version in English, pay $5 (or whatever).

“I don’t think the Slashdot argument is that anyone who is creative (writing/composing/whatever) should be denied payment for their efforts, but simply that those who are going to be the most successful going forward are those that embrace a new business model, rather than continue to cling on by their fingernails to the old one.”

I have seen various riffs on this idea throughout the comment thread. I agree with the essence of most of these responses. I will make more-or-less the same point, from a somewhat different angle. This may help your see the situation a bit more clearly, and that’s the best start towards a more palatable solution.

As someone in the business of marketing ideas and products, I have observed that the most successful purveyors of same are those who recognize not only the Value, but the very Necessity of marketing their wares. Marketing in some cases is more than half the battle.

I have seen this frequently in blogs. The most highly-trafficked blogs are not generally the best-written, most insightful ones. The traffic goes to the most social, the most publicized, the most famous, and the most moneyed bloggers. Occasionally, yes, quality does find its way to the top. But in general it is those chasing fame the hardest who catch it.

There’s nothing to be bitter about here. There are merely lessons to be learned. Two of them, to be exact:

1) IT IS NOT A QUESTION OF YOUR PRODUCT. Oh, no doubt your product could be improved. By all means do so, it won’t hurt. But you must STOP doing it INSTEAD of proper marketing.

2) PART OF MARKETING and success in your field is the form in which your product is ‘packaged’. In other words, handing out free PDFs clearly did not work, from the POV of keeping you in business. OK. But you need to LOSE THE MINDSET THAT IT ‘SHOULD’ HAVE WORKED, which seems to be all you can focus on. It did not work for you simply because that is a business plan that does NOT work. Steven King tried the very same thing, and it did not work for HIM, either. So tell me again why it ‘SHOULD’ have worked for you, and how the problem is with the audience.

There ARE writers and other creators working online, who are making their living. In some cases, they are making a handsome living. Find them and study them. Learn what you can, and innovate.

You know what does not work. So don’t do THAT. Find out what DOES. It is competitive in the marketplace of ideas? Yes, and it always was. But you have a better chance of reaching your audience today than ever before. Maybe someone will come along and find your audience for you, but I strongly suspect this is something you will have to do for yourself.

Hey, lookit that, I got name-checked in the comments.

Steven, you’re absolutely right that what you described is no kind of business model.

Putting a donation button on a page with a downloadable file is like putting a tip jar on the inside of a drive-thru-only restaurant. It’s going to take an awfully satisfied customer to come back and drop you a buck or two after having drove off and eaten their meal, isn’t it?

A better approach is to make the work perusable online (i.e., chapter by chapter in a blog) with the donation button clearly visible in a sidebar. This way, people have the opportunity to show their appreciation while they’re still in the very act of appreciating. Makes more sense, doesn’t it?

(Feel free to tell me, as so many others have, that people don’t like to read the printed word off the internet. Write a whole blog post about it, so all the readers of your blog can chime in about how much they do not like to read stuff on the internet.)

Failing that, adding a solicitation for donations and (if applicable) a hyperlink to the donation page to the downloadable file will help.

Basically, to make the “give away for free” model succeed, you need to make it easy for people to donate without having to remember to come back to the point of distribution specifically to do so.

That said, I’ve got a couple questions which you may feel to treat as rhetorical or answer in general terms, as they touch on money.

You mention the percentage of readers who donated. Are you viewing all of the readers who didn’t donate as “lost sales?” Considering that none of them were likely potential sales in the first place, I hardly think that’s the most accurate way of looking at it.

You also mention the lowest donations, but there’s no indication of average donation, or how much money you made overall, or how this might compare to the book’s first run publication. I can easily guess from your treatment of the subject that the answers are “not much” and “poorly”, but it’s worth making those things explicit, if only for the sake of clarity.

Having heard and read too many personal accounts of authors who’ve made nothing but pocket change for their efforts doing things the traditional way, I think there’s a lot to be said for getting a voluntary donation even from every one or two thousand readers.

I have some thoughts in response to some of your other points, but I’ll save that for a post on my own blog as this is already quite long enough for a comment.

I should be more precise when I talk about “lost sales”… I’m talking about whatever number of people downloaded/read it and then did not contribute in any way to your financial success.

I think we can safely assume that number is larger than zero, and I would agree with anybody who said it would be better if that number were smaller… but I like to discourage people from following the RIAA Theory of Economics, which states that any money anywhere which does not end up in your pocket represents a net loss.

Artists who find success online frequently follow models where a tiny fraction of their audience (sometimes less than 1%) pays for all the rest. Far from being a case of “Only the big guys can afford to do business this way,” only the big guys have any realistic alternative. People are far less likely to pay up front for an unknown quantity.

The people who don’t pay still help by contributing word of mouth, and of course, just as with financial donations, you can do things to encourage this and make it easier for them.

I want to start out by saying I actually agree with the basic premise of your article. Giving your content away isn’t something you owe the world or anything stupid like that. Giving your content away should be a business decision, and that’s your decision to make, none some idiot who can’t see the difference between the information and the work required to collect, create, and present that information.

That being said…

But if there’s been a comparable success by a band that hasn’t already gained its cultural capital and name-recognition through the evils of copyright and corporate promotion, I’d like to know about it.

With bands, I can’t say there are a lot of bands that have achieved THAT level of success, but it’s only recently that bands have even considered that an option. To a band, a label is “How you make it big” and there are definitely bands that have a achieved a fairly ridiculous amount of success in a short time this way. Are you familiar with nerdcore hiphop, for example?

But your description of the situation shows an ignorance of how the label system works. Unless you have THAT level of success, album sales rarely go to the band at all. In fact, the band usually ends up paying the label back for recording expenses. How can they possibly afford to pay the labels back? With money from touring. There are thousands of indie rock bands that are entirely successful (nicer houses that mine for sure) that do indeed make nearly all of their money from merch and touring. Album sales are the nearly always the smallest slice of the pie. Albums sales are also a bit different in that while you can create a reasonably good recording for very little, to create something truly professional sounding still requires a fair amount of cash in equipment and experienced labor.

Oh Mr Freetard, you work as a programmer, do you? How interesting. So do you perform all your corporate programming duties for free, and earn your keep by selling personally branded mousemats on the side?

Again, tons of examples of this (or rather, giving the software away and making additional services such as support or customization free). A lot of open-source software works in exactly this way, where the software is free and then you pay for additional services, Red Hat being the classic example. I’m currently in a pilot of a lecture capture system that works this way as well.

But, those are metaphors. Let’s get back to the question at hand. Can a writer make a living on the internet? Writers are the content authors MOST able to make a living by giving away his/her content. Most of the people reading this are reading it because of a link from John Gruber, a writer who gives his content away. What about web comics like Penny Arcade, who not only sell books of the same content that’s available for free online, but who now have a convention named after them? What about magazines like The Escapist, which only exist online? How about David Wong, who published his book online a chapter at a time?

It’s a mistake to assume that distributing your content for free online is the only way forward, but it’s also a mistake to say—in this late age where lots of people are actively doing it—that it doesn’t work.

Brian: While what is happening in the printing industry is almost as complex as the ‘righttoeat’ issue, on the topic of getting paid for a valuable skill it’s closer than most people think.
As design and publishing applications became more accessible to people at home, they began wondering why they should pay the printer for pre-press and artworking time. The end result is a cheaper print job for them but a generally lower standard of quality globally. Is that not the kind of result Steven fears in his sector?
What if rather than comparing to online music and software, professional writing takes the same place in modern society as art? People pay huge sums of money for the original piece but art galleries have had to keep entry fees incredibly low or nonexistent to ensure that art does not become extinct. There may be no direct contrast here, but it’s a good example of how supply and demand works in the content creation field.

I’m not complaining:

Well, yes, you are. And at considerable length. There’s more than a little denial at work here.

But if you prefer, we’ll relabel it ‘whining with attitude’. Better?

You need to work on your reading… the “Stephen King” model… worked for King because he was already Stephen King

You need to “work on” YOUR reading:

http://archive.salon.com/lette.....2/08/king/

Wiki on how King stopped work on the project (i.e, as fare as he was concerned, it failed): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plant

Once King told readers the total cost of the book would be about that of a hardcover edition, downloads dropped of dramatically. (One might well argue that KIng was charging too much for the book, and that this was the reason for the failure. We’ll never really know.)

Did King get a big initial response? Of course he did, he’s Steven King, and you are not, as you noted. Was the experiment a success? No, it was not. That is why he stopped. Had it been a success, at the level a Steven King can expect, he’d have continued. He has himself said, and through his actions made plain, that the model does not work for him. It does not work for you, either. It just does not work. There are more easily-found links than are worth posting that detail how this failed.

Maybe your real complaint is that you’re not Steven King. That certainly seems to be the subtext here.

And of course, you completely missed every single word I wrote on marketing, because it wasn’t what you wanted to hear. And I’m starting to get it. The real problem is that the unwashed masses don’t realize you’re far more worthy of their time than King. What’s WRONG with them?

I understand now that you aren’t actually seeking answers. (And you certainly weren’t seeking criticism!) You want a soapbox from which you can preen and condescend. My error, and it’s a foolish one I won’t repeat. Please, carry on.

Uh huh. Just picked up on an Amazon review of your book.

“”Unspeak” might have made an interesting article for a magazine, but the material the author has gathered here doesn’t warrant a book. It embeds the journalistic fantasy that seems to plague so many modern ink-stained wretches: the fantasy that, since objectivity cannot ever be accomplished, subjectivity is just fine thank you very much, and that anyone’s subjective stance is therefore as objective as anyone else’s. [Incidentally, this is part of the reason for the awful modern ‘news’ practice of having journalists interviewing each other.]

The book is really an embittered rant against (mostly) modern public political discourse. The author’s particlar political prejudices shine brightly, and badly distract from the central theme of exploring political speech.

Minor errors (such as seeming to completely misunderstand the very old term “natural sciences”) further disrupt the flow.

The book this one attempted to be still needs to be written.”

http://www.amazon.com/Unspeak-.....802118259/

Could it be your book was just… really, really bad? Could it be that the real problem here is that – you’re not really much of a writer?

Although I must admit it has been funny to be lectured on “marketing” by someone whose blog has 18 feed subscribers. :)

My oh my. We’re in grade school. I’m not the one complaining about the marketplace and not selling my wares – that would be you. My little blog gets as much attention as I’m willing to work for, and I have no complaints about it. But hey, thanks for going to all the trouble to check it out – that information on the RSS feed was buried somewhere at the bottom. Even I’m not quite sure where it is.

Although I must admit it has been funny to be lectured by a whining, petulant, egocentric child whose life’s purpose seems to be blaming others for his shortcomings.

Read that review again. The “embittered rant” part really hits home, doesn’t it?

I downloaded your book but didn’t leave a donation. It wasn’t that I wanted to rip you off, see, I’d already bought the hardcopy version. I thought it was a useful work, to the degree that I paid to get some key portions I’d highlighted typed up so I could do text search on them. I downloaded the copy so if I ever went back to that I wouldn’t have to get more data entry done.

So don’t feel too bad. You were paid, upfront, but you just didn’t know it. If the business plan that was for had taken off, you’d have been strongly considered as a consultant. And if it ever should go, you still would be.

You have my email, contact me if you wish.

I have an EMusic subscription, and I buy things EMusic doesn’t have on Amazon (preferably MP3s, but I’ll buy physical CDs as a last resort). I will happily pay for music if it’s good, and especially if it’s reasonably priced.

Likewise, I buy plenty of books (especially technical books, for which I see a solid ROI as a programmer), and read others in free online versions or through my paid subscription to the Safari service. It’s easy to find high-quality technical books on certain topics (especially theoretical/academic ones), because the sites I use to keep up with tech information have good filters. Better filters than some professional publishers, judging from a few of the books I’ve bought.

Honestly, I don’t begrudge anyone making a living producing content. As a programmer, I make a living producing content myself. At the same time, as a content producer, it’s your job to produce something people want enough to buy. If I produce software that’s not any better than open source, I can hardly expect all that many people to buy it just because I need the income. If you write books no one cares about reading, that won’t benefit you either.

The fundamental problem with the music industry is that most of the products they want to sell you are perceived as a poor value and are *less* valuable than something you can track down for free. DRM is a pain in the ass. CDs are expensive, and less convenient than MP3s.

Where are the $3-5 bargain back-catalog CDs? Where are the tools to make music consumers’ lives easier or better? The music industry has spent a decade completely uninterested in trying to provide their customers with a good value proposition, and they sit back, stunned at the fact that consumers have routed around them to get the music they want in the format they want.

I feel sorry for the artists, but the music industry oligarchy may have to finish putting themselves out of business before things really start getting fixed.

If the breathless advocates of “the free distribution of ideas” are serious, they need either a) to come up with a realistic proposal as to how I am to keep feeding myself while giving the fruits of my labours away for free; or b) come out and say honestly that they don’t think any such thing as a “professional writer” ought to exist, and that I should just get a job like anyone else.

Partipatory Economics (Parecon for short) is your answer to A, although you’d be giving it away for free only in the sense that it would be free as in freedom, not free as in beer, because you’re remunerated for effort and sacrifice, not output. People would have to actually want to read your stuff for you to be remunerated, of course.

With respect to your footnote #6, Geoff Ryman’s 253 may count. It was one of the first novels written specifically for the internet, and actively traded on the interconnectedness of hypertext. OTOH, it has probably been more successful — and is certainly a more comfortable read — in print form, notwithstanding the loss of clickable links. Moreover, Ryman was already a moderately successful author in traditional print media, and I don’t believe he ever suggested that 253 signified the death of publishing.

The thing about free software is that while the product itself might be top-notch, the support available for free does not have to be. For example, right now I am trying to support a change to the JBoss application server. Between versions 4.2 and 4.3, they changed the messaging service. I now have to pore over online documentation, which sucks by the way. Or I could get some support, for the low-low fee of a few thousand a year, so that they can help me out. Okay, that works for them.

But for a writer, once your work is out, well, um, I don’t think that it needs any support. So the whole thing about supporting your “software,” which is really documentation, doesn’t hold. Now if you would charge people to get updates, like if you just put out the initial error-ridden draft online but would make the finished edited product available for a fee, and perhaps have the online community “debug” your manuscript for you, well, there you might have something. Good luck with that.

BTW, there are some technical books put out by Manning that are available in PDF form, but they also brand the book with the buyer’s name on each page before sending it to you. Dunno if that would help, since the person who initially paid for it and plastered it over the Internet may claim that he or she had it ripped off.

[BTW, the preview function sucks the life out of my MBP running Firefox 2.]

Steve … Steve … Steve…

As Milton Freeman would have said – all “price” is – is information. At this time the “price” of fuel and food is front and center. This means some of us may need to think carefully how we consume these products. In socialist states (not Russia – take Michigan for example), the actual price or costs (ex.: of government services) are hidden so the average person is left out of the decision making loop. So information is important and we should be thankful for rising prices (as we are when prices go down).
My point being that you get to charge whatever the market will bare.
You need to finish the experiment: now offer a download for a buck and see what happens. Have some fun with it and try two bucks next month.
I am amazed that I can make a living writing on the web. It’s hard work and challenging with the general economic slowdown, but I bump my head on the ceiling every morning getting up at 5:30AM. If the passion is there, so too will be the money. Best regards!

I think the problem has less to do giving anything away for free as with bringing people around to seeing the value in buying written material, as creative intellectual property, on the Internet. This will happen eventually, and I see us in the middle of a transitionary period right now that will just take some time. People have gotten used to ordering consumer goods on the Net, iTunes (etc) is doing well, and ebooks are slowly picking up momentum, so there are some positive signs. A trade paperback is now approaching $20 (!!), so there will be a growing price differential between ‘legacy’ books and ebooks, just as there is with music “albums”. The big issue with this model is how the creative artist can control his or her intellectual property from piracy. The technology is there to accomplish this, but the options are still relatively limited. For books Adobe’s new DRM is just being rolled out, and it will be interesting to see what kind of functionality they’ve built into it. In any case, I don’t think it’s worth even responding to the ‘Freetards’, that would be giving them too much credence.

So far as I am concerned, writers and artists should get jobs or patrons. Copyright needs to be completely abolished, because it is being abused to such an extent that it threatens our freedom. (I would also be happy with a return to the way it was in say 1970). The questionable advantages of the copyright system do not outweigh its bad effects. Further, I would really like the music and movie industries to go away. We don’t need them. I don’t watch movies or listen to music, but I value my freedom, and I don’t like the way things are going with copyright laws and treaties. Also, the music and movie industries have a very toxic effect on our democratic government. The same goes for television. I don’t watch it, and it has an extremely toxic effect on government. Television should just go away.

“Oh Mr Freetard, you work as a programmer, do you? How interesting. So do you perform all your corporate programming duties for free, and earn your keep by selling personally branded mousemats on the side?”

No, they make their money by being paid by their employer (e.g. RedHat, Novell) to write the code.

Their employer gives away the code. The employer then makes it’s money by offering support, services and/or very nicely packaged boxes of the software with manuals, etc., for the software that was compiled from that code.

I have an idea which is somewhere in between giving away books for free and selling them one by one. It is as follows:

1) Author publishes a demo (e.g. first chapter of e-book).

2) Those who want to purchase state how much they want to pay.

3) Author watches accumulated sum and as soon as it is satisfactory big releases the product. Everybody who promised to buy are charged and given the access to the product.

I have a website digributor.com but it is still in the test mode. And I currently thinking on what would be the best product to sell on my site.

Steven, could you please tell what do you think? My e-mail: feedback2@digributor.com

“Freetards” is a pretty spot-on term for anyone who thinks that giving up your ideas for free is the true essence of creative work. Most of the best, deepest, and clearly expressed ideas surely come from prolonged contemplative engagement with the topic at hand. It takes a lot of time to arrive at complete, properly expressed ideas. Too much time to, say, do a full-time job (which allows you to go on feeding yourself and thus fulfil the primary prerequisite for all ideas: being alive).

If we are all to give away our ideas for free, then we must all do the work to complete these ideas in our own spare time as we will be far too busy with a day job that keeps us alive to spend any serious time thinking long and hard on deeper or more complex matters. Thus, if ideas are to be given away for free, expect either a dramatic drop in their quantity, or otherwise their quality. Perhaps even both.

There is a reason that historically many of the greatest thinkers have been hereditarily rich idlers. They have the money in their pocket to keep themselves alive without having to shed even one bead of sweat. They also have long days to fill without much to do, so there is plenty of motivation to spend time thinking hard! This is not a jab at wealthy idlers, and I have no issues with those great thinkers who were fortunate enough to be in a position where they could dedicate their time to thinking for free. Indeed, we are indebted to these people.

Fortune is something we cannot choose, and cannot hold against others who are born into it. What we can hold against someone is the unreasonable request that we spend large amounts of our time thinking hard to come to fully-realised conclusions only to give them away for free. It is simply not possible for the average human to do this without risking their shelter and foodsource.

However, in spite of my own impoverished bank-balance hre’s one idea I’m willing to give away for free: why not take into account at least some practical considerations when thinking about the economy of thinking?

p.s. Yes, I know there may be one or two ideas that perhaps should be given away for free. For example, the solution to all of life’s problems. But these are exceptions, and what we’re really discussing is the rule. So, give away your hard-thought ideas for free? Seriously?

I think authors who give away ebooks of their publications are onto something. Here’s what it all comes down to. What kind of author do you want to be?

I know for me, being an author, I give away one of my books for free. I would rather have readers more than anything, and this way they’re familiar with me and know I won’t let them down. And I think giving away one book is plenty for someone to see your style. Here it is if you want it, goto http://www.daughterofnewyork.com and on the top right, on the black bar, there’s a secret link. Highlight the area with your mouse, or wave it around until it changes to a hand and you’ll see it. It’s meant for teens but by all means, go for it, and enjoy.

I understand what it’s like walking through the bookstore and seeing so many books and authors, and the potential competition you are up against as a writer. It could be overwhelming. But I think the answer is more in the product and in the marketing. (although giving your book away is certainly marketing, but all your books? That’s up to the writer.)

I think the percentage of people that will buy your books, after reading the previous ones for free are minimal, especially in this economy.

People don’t even go to the movies anymore, or even rent dvd’s. They go to youtube because somebody had that time to upload the whole movie in thirteen parts. Unless they really want to see a movie in widescreen with rich color will they actually pay money. But after you’ve seen it on youtube, the experience is already gone, so what’s the point of buying it? You must really, really love it.

Now here’s the thing, who’s your audience? Because if your audience is like the fans of the series of Twilight or Harry Potter, fans that love and embrace the book fibers that contain the story they love, then why give it away free? And look, I’ve never heard of one of those fans wanting a refund. Also, value is placed when you exchange money for something. But if your book is read by people that read hundreds of books, and yours will just be another notch, then who cares what you do with it really.

I don’t think the question is whether to give your books away or not. I think the question is how do you want to market your book and yourself? If the answer is giving your book away? Then great. If the answer is running contests or giving away the first chapter free, then great. If your marketing is having a bookcover that stands out, and the text on the pages formated elaborately, then great. The question is how do you want to market?

Mr. Doctorow has found a way to market himself. He even said in his interview he makes more money from other engagements than from his royalties.

I think the fair thing to do nowadays is list your ebook for .99 cents on the Amazon Kindle or as a pdf somewhere. This way, your audience pays a dollar, big deal, a dollar, and you get a little something something. Because I think if you don’t charge, they will just wait until your next book is free. You create the market. Harry Potter fans are already in the mindset they have to fork over twenty-five bucks.

I think what you want to create is a satisfied customer. A customer is someone who buys. If they get your book for free, how can they be a satisfied customer? They could be a satified reader, true. But I think being a satisfied customer and a satisfied reader is probably the best.

So in closing, I think it’s great some found a way that works for them and is happy with it. But I think the focus should be on marketing, not only about giving your books away. Is giving your books away a short cut to creative marketing? hmmm…

Enrique

p.s. – there’s so much more to this conversation.