How giving ebooks away for free increases print book sales
I’m always on the lookout for authors who not only embrace ebooks but use them to compliment their print book sales. The most interesting way of doing this, I think, is by giving ebooks away for free. Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow does it and I’m sure a lot of other writers do to.
Last night I came across the blog of writer JA Konrath (who goes by the pen name Jack Kilborn) via this Enriched by Words blog post. As I side note, I’d like to mention that I had the pleasure of seeing Konrath in my local bookstore when he stopped by to sign a few copies of his book. He happens to also live in the Chicago area like I do.
Anyway, in Konrath’s blog post Ebooks and Free Books and Amazon Kindle, Oh My he talks a lot about how distributing his ebooks for free has really helped his print book sales, not hurt them, as many publishers fear. He even lists out the reasons why he gives his ebooks away for free. Here are a few exampless:
2. Books Are Expensive. Many people don’t want to spend $24.99 or even $6.99 to take a chance on an unknown. And even fewer want to spend $14.99 on an ebook download. But people love a bargain, and free is the best bargain of all.
Let’s face it: There are many more unknown authors out there than famous ones. And people don’t like to shell out hard earned cash on someone who is unknown. When an author gives away an ebook for free, readers have nothing to lose. They are much more likely to give that author a chance. If they like the ebook, then they’ll probably buy the print book the author is selling. If they don’t like the ebook, they haven’t lost anything.
3. Free is Viral. If you Google Kilborn+Crouch+Serial, you currently get 6550 hits. Part of that is because of an orchestrated campaign done by Blake and I, in conjunction with my publisher, Grand Central. But part of it is because people are talking about it, picking up on it, repeating it, linking to it, etc. Publicity and promotion is free and easier to come by (if you’re a midlister) when you’re giving something away.
This reminds me of something Cory Doctorow said regarding book piracy (forgive me, I don’t have the exact quote). But he basically said he’s more worried about obscurity than someone pirating his books. I think Konrath has the same idea here too. Does Konrath worry about piracy? Probably not. In fact he appears to encourage people to link to his ebooks and some even offer Konrath’s work on their own websites.
Indeed, obscurity can ruin even the most talented writer. If no one knows about you and your books, no one will buy them. And with the sheer number of books being published and sold nowadays, getting noticed is harder than ever. I’ve always maintained that once an author gets a publishing contract and his/her book is on the way to bookstores, it is no guarantee of success. I’ve seen a lot of good books disappear from the shelves of my local bookstore, not because they are selling well, but because they have been returned to the publisher for not selling at all.
Konrath understands this perfectly:
One of the biggest hurdles to overcome in the print world is distribution. The number of print books I sell is limited by the number of books printed, and the places they are for sale. If no one is aware of my books, no one will buy them. I strive to make people aware I exist, so readers seek me out rather than accidentally run into me, but I can only reach so many people.
“Free” isn’t a replacement for traditonal print books at traditional price points. Instead, free compliments those print books. Free is used to market those books. Free gives an unknown author a chance of being known, which is the key to selling books. This might seem counterintuitive – giving stuff away for free to sell more (and that’s probably why most publishers resist it so much). But it works. Authors like Doctorow and Konrath are proving it every day.
Finally, Konrath makes one last excellent point that is worth sharing:
As I’ve stated before, digital content wants to be free. People don’t like paying for downloads, whether they be pdfs or mp3s, because they are overpriced and there isn’t a perceived value in binary code, which is all digital content really is. This is why 13 of the top visited sites on the Internet are file-sharing sites–it’s often faster, easier, and much cheaper to steal digital content than it is to buy it.
This is one of the keys to understanding piracy. The internet has ushered in an age of free content and is turning the economics of book publishing and the music industry on their respective heads.
Of course, I’m not saying every ebook sold online must be free. Not at all. If an author wants to make some extra cash by charging a fair price for an ebook, it is certainly worth a shot, and many authors have been successful doing so. But the key here is a fair price. Charging $23.99 for an ebook is not a fair price. Publishers can justify it any way they want, though the audience they are trying to reach won’t buy it.
What do you think about free? A great way to sell more print books, or just cheapening the value of the author’s work? Leave a comment below with your thoughts.
Related posts
- Giving it away for free: Obscurity vs. Making Money as a Writer
- Update: Giving it away for free: Obscurity vs. Making Money
- Barnes & Noble considers bundling print books and ebooks
- Power of FREE: Selling books by giving them away!
- Ebooks and Author Book Signings
Read More: Author News, Publishing News, eBooks
Hey Brad,
I think you make really good points, but my concern is… what happens if ebooks ever become the primary format, rather than print books, or even if ebooks so go far as to someday replace print books?
If we’ve all been giving the ebooks away for free, won’t we have set up an expectation in readers minds that digital books aren’t worth paying for, and therefore, people won’t?
If we knew that print books would be preferred forever this is a great system. But it is something that concerns me if free becomes too big of a habit. There already isn’t enough money in fiction these days.
Hi Zoe!
You ask some excellent questions. And unfortunately, I don’t have all the answers.
I can’t see print books leaving us anytime soon. They’ll be around for a while. And I think that right now ebooks are a alternative/compliment to print books, not a replacement for them.
As far as your concern about free ebooks becoming the “norm” and no one will want to pay for them down the road – it’s too early to tell how ebooks will shape the future of publishing.
Using myself as an example, I know there are plenty of free ebooks out there, but a majority of the ebooks I own I paid for. Why? Because I like supporting the authors (especially the indie ones).
Thank you for your comment and I apologize I can’t provide better answers to your questions. The world of ebooks is rapidly changing and I don’t think anyone knows for sure how this will all play out.
-Brad
Yes, but if something begins to be accepted culturally as “free” then later down the road the consumer feels cheated when you ask him to pay for it, and ends up trying to steal it.
I’m not sure whether or not ebooks would ever replace print books, but with the newer ebook readers I can see a future that way in maybe 20 years. It seems like a shaky bet to offer it totally free as standard practice. I have a free ebook out right now, so that may make me sound insane. But the diff is, I don’t plan to offer all my E free. Otherwise I set up that expectation and cut off a profit center.
And also what about authors who are only e-book authors? If a culture becomes set up where a lot or most E you can get for free, there won’t be enough people who want to “support the author” who will seek out ebook authors who are only published that way and therefore can’t give it away for free or else they are working for free.
I just see it as a system that if embraced too wholesale cuts out current ebook authors and screws us all over down the road at some point.
I know you don’t have all the answers, and I’m not asking you to have them, but I think this is something we should all consider as a potential flaw in the idea of free as a policy.
Zoe Winters’s latest blog post..Author Interview is up at alternative-read.com
@zoe winters – You bring up a good point that people get used to a culture of free and it’s hard to break them of the habit.
When cell phones first came out, everybody gave away free phones with the signing of a contract. My dad worked for Motorola and I remember him telling me that Motorola was having a hard time with getting the cell companies to have customers pay for their phones. The cell companies had created a culture of free, and even today most of them have some sort of free phone with contract and customers would rather lock themselves into a 2-year contract than buy an unsubsidized phone.
But, these eBooks are being given away in addition to buying a tangible copy. It is almost like the publishers are saying people can access the content in anyway they want, either in print or as an eBook. With this, I would be more concerned that publishers are moving to a “content license” model over a culture of free model.
Hi Susan, those are good points, but it still disenfranchises E-only authors completely.
But you make a good point about content license.
Right now I’m in the middle of my own experiment of free and the point is to get as much exposure as possible before I release my first print release, but at the same time, you lose so much control of everything.
Like right now my novella is free. It’s fully copyright protected, but it has a creative commons license attached so people can share it as long as they attribute back to me.
And now I have the bizarre situation of people sharing my book in one of the same places I’m sharing it… Scrib’d.
And for an anal retentive stats tracking queen I’m like… noooo just send them to me, lol. But… I SHOULD be more focused on the awesomeness that someone took the time to repost.
It feels almost like “retweeting.”
But it certainly stirs up some weird emotions about the exercise.
Zoe Winters’s latest blog post..Coolness!
Harlequin are giving away one of my books for free and I noticed an uplift in sales at Amazon, which seems v. odd. But as someone once said, I’ll try anything once except incest and country dancing.
I believe that, just like anything that has progressed through the years (such as cell phones, like Susan mentioned earlier), people will eventually adapt along with the progression of the industries.
Let’s say that, E-books and online materials become the Norm, versus paper books. Given that situation, with the non-availability of paperbooks, people will be forced to use E-books. Where they once paid for paper books, they will now have those funds available to pay for E-books. Most ebooks will probably not be free, but it will be a gradual transition, something that people will easily get used to. And new generations will see that “paying for ebooks” is routine and expected.
Zoe commented that she expected E-books to be the norm in ~20 years, if it were to happen at all. That’s actually quite a long time for an industry to evolve. (in my opinion). In 20 years, we would have a whole new generation and the older generation would have plenty of time to watch the changes.
Surely we will see many people upset, but that’s how the world goes, right? Not everyone likes the new president, but he’s there and that’s that. Not everyone votes the same way on current issues such as gun control, abortioin, etc.
We can’t please everyone, but the industries will follow where they can make the most profit.
We, as authors, should make the most of the current situation and use free ebooks to get our names out there. If we should ever rise high enough to have our names recognized in any bookstore we want, then we won’t have any problems getting a few bucks or more for our books we choose to publish electronically. Our names will hold a value that people (most) won’t gripe about paying for.
By the way, I think this article was excellent. Very informative and helpful. I agree completely that giving away your publications electronically is truly a wonderful idea for up-and-coming authors.
I began writing because I love to write. I love to create characters and stories and watch them play themselves out across my pages. It’s amazing to see where the imagination takes us. It’s wonderful to read a book and become immersed in it.
Based on my foundations of writing, I have no problem whatsoever giving away my books for free for a time. I want people to enjoy my writing as I have enjoyed so many other’s writings. And being “free” makes the books that much more enjoyable.
This is very exciting territory! When I think about the number of books I’ve borrowed, or picked up for 25 cents at a second-hand thrift store (it’s how I first read Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Frank Herbert, and others) I realize that the authors did not profit directly from my reading of these books, but somehow, obviously, things worked out okay for those authors. I did eventually purchase other books they wrote. And people made movies based on their books. So, yeah, making free texts available seems to be a good idea for writers and publishers.
Hey Bill, while I won’t argue with you that free ebooks can be a good strategy, I will say it’s very different from a second hand book. Yes, an author doesn’t profit from a book sold through a used bookstore, but in order for that book to even BE in a used bookstore,SOMEONE had to purchase it first.
With free ebooks, no one ever has to buy anything ever. *If* we ever got to a point where ebooks were the primary delivery system and people are used to “free” it could crush publishing and cause authors to make even less than they do now. (Even most NY pubbed authors still have to have a second full time or part time job in order to support themselves. Which is pretty sad. Most authors make poverty level wages.)
Zoe Winters’s latest blog post..Deadlines
I’m jumping into the discussion late but here are a few thoughts from someone who has not purchased a paper book in over two years.My best experience with E-Books has been with Baen Books.(www.baen.com) they have a large library of titles for purchase but,also many free downloads are available. Eric Flint wrote an excellent editorial about how free can be very profitable.You can find it on their WebScription page under Free Library. As we go more in the direction of digital entertainment this may be the model to get things started.