Update: Giving it away for free: Obscurity vs. Making Money
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.
Just after my last post on this topic, I stumbled upon another post named Sales Impact of Free eBooks Dissertation Published. The dissertation was researched and written by a doctoral student studying the effects of “free” on ebook sales. You can read exactly how his study was set up, so I’ll get to the meat of what this student discovered:
During the ten weeks of the study the books were downloaded 102,556 times. Collectively, the books sold 68 more copies in the ten weeks they were online for free versus the ten previous weeks. This was an increase in sales of 26%. Over the same period of time in 2008, sales of these same books decreased by 38%.
The post continues:
There was a moderately strong correlation (r=.65) between downloads and Internet print sales (the more books that were downloaded, the more books were purchased online). Thus if more books had been available and downloaded the number of additional books sold would likely have increased.
The post does talk about the limitations of this study. These limitations include the relatively small number of books studied and the short, 10 week, duration of the study. Despite the study appears to prove what I (and many others) have been advocating, I think it’s important to disclose possible problems with the study.
Writers need to market themselves, just like any other business
In the end, writers need to think of themselves as a business. All businesses need to advertise and market their products. When an author gives away ebooks for free to sell future ebooks, it’s really just the author marketing him/herself. Most businesses out there use the same principle of giving stuff away for free because it increases sales of other products. Writers should be no different.
The main point of those who disagree with authors giving books away for free seems to be that authors should be fairly compensated for their work (an idea I totally agree with). However, giving back titles away is in investment in the marketing of future titles and other works. It’s a sales strategy that, if implemented correctly, will pay big dividends.
Related Posts
- Giving it away for free: Obscurity vs. Making Money as a Writer
- How giving ebooks away for free increases print book sales
- Power of FREE: Selling books by giving them away!
- Free ebooks: Thank you Lexcycle!
- Money tempts French students away from literature
Read More: eBooks, Publishing News, Self-Publishing, Writing
