The other day I wrote the post Giving it away for free: Obscurity vs. Making Money as a Writer. In it, I argued that giving books away for free is not going to hurt a writer’s career. In fact, free books can give writers (especially unknown writers) a boost and increase sales of future books.

The post was prompted by an article I read by Angela Hoy from http://www.writersweekly.com entitled Think Twice Before Giving Away Your Entire Book Online for Free. While I have a lot of respect for Angela and read her weekly newsletter every week, I have to disagree on this point.

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The debate about whether or not it’s a good idea for authors to provide their work for free (especially back titles) continues to rage on around the internet. I usually think of this in terms of ebooks, as they are easier to give away for free without the burden of printing and shipping costs.

The main argument in favor of giving your works away for free goes something like this: You provide an ebook or two for free, and it will give readers a sampling of your work, enticing them to buy future ebooks that they would, of course, pay for. This has worked for many authors who claim that giving their stuff away does increase their sales of other books.

On the flip side, the argument against giving your work away for free is that readers will expect it for free and will expect the same thing with all of your books, thus no one will want to pay. Why pay when you can get it for free, right? The other issue that comes into play here is that authors should be fairly compensated for their work.

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Writers can be a lonely bunch, which is why every writer needs a writing buddy. Mine just happens to be my cat, Kirby. This morning she made herself comfortable on my desk, behind my computer – trying to catch a few rays of sunshine coming in through the window.

What you don’t see in this picture is Kirby sniffing at everything on my desk (my writing tools must smell good) and batting at my pens, paperclips and anything else that’s easy for her paws to move. She also has a habit of biting at, and even eating paper, if it’s handy to do so.

Okay, maybe she’s not the perfect writing buddy, but she does keep me company and definitely keeps me amused as I work through the day’s business.

Who is your writing buddy?

I’m so glad Friday is here. It has been a pretty crazy week. Although, I expect most upcoming weeks for the foreseeable future to be pretty crazy as well.

Using a thesaurus may seem like a no-brainer for most writers. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen writing that uses the same word over and over again. I’ve seen it in blog posts, fiction, essays and just about every other type of writing you can think of. I’m guilty of this myself, and have often been embarrassed by my writing when I see a word used countless times. To combat this problem, I’m relying more and more on the good ol’ thesaurus.

Thanks to technology and the power of the internet, you don’t even need to grab that dusty book off your shelf to get a list of synonyms for frequently used words. My favorite website for finding word definitions and possible synonyms to use is dictionary.reference.com. If you use Firefox, there’s a nifty little add-on that places a search box right on the lower corner of your browser – reducing the need for bookmarks.

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As Brad’s Reader grows, so does the amount of comment spam. I’m still spending more and more time deleting spam comments, which now seem to outnumber legitimate comments. It’s a fine balancing act because the last thing I want to do is discourage people from participating here. I love reading your thoughts, opinions, experiences and so forth.

So, in order to reduce the time I spend dealing with spam, I’m going to start implementing a few changes that probably won’t affect the majority of legitimate visitors who want to leave a thoughtful comment.

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Just wrapped up another busy week – and things probably won’t slow down for the foreseeable future. But I can’t complain because I’m doing what I love.

There’s really not much else to say. Since this week’s installment of Friday Link Love is a little late, I’ll let you get right to your reading. Have a happy and safe weekend!

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Ever since I became an ebook evangelist I have promoted the idea that ebooks are the perfect platform to offer more than just the text of the novel/short story. What does this mean? An enriched ebook offers a glimpse of a working author in a “behind the scenes” sort of fashion.

While there are any number of ways to enrich an ebook, I always envisioned them with rough drafts (so the reader can see how the story evolved), outlines, interviews, alternate endings and more.

Bestselling novelist David Baldacci has done just that with his new book

Looks like the Bard might have written more than his already prolific canon of plays. A Shakespeare scholar from the University of Nottingham is fairly certain of the confirmation a new play was written by Shakespeare. According this article from the AP via Yahoo! News:

After years of literary investigation, a professor at the University of Nottingham said Tuesday he’s certain “Double Falsehood, or the Distressed Lovers” was born out of “Cardenio,” a play Shakespeare scholars believe existed…”There is definitely Shakespearean DNA,” said English literature professor Brean Hammond, who has worked since 2002 to determine if “Double Falsehood” has Shakespearean roots.

As the article mentions, there is not enough proof with 100% certainty that “Double Falsehood” is based off of this mysterious “Cardenio” play.

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I’ve been reading Stephen King since high school. Most of his novels are okay, and there have been a few I really loved. So when I bought his most recent magnum opus, Under the Dome (aff link) as an ebook, I didn’t know what to expect.

The basic premise of Stephen King’s Under the Dome is very simple: A mysterious dome falls over the town of Chester’s Mill, cutting the town and its inhabitants off from the rest of the world. Families are split apart. Electricity is cut off. No more shipments of food or other supplies. Worst of all, even the town’s air supply is isolated and quickly becomes stale and filled with pollutants. And like a window left unwashed, the dome gets dirty, blurring the sun and turning the stars strange colors.

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