Set your books free, Quill & Quire tells writers
By Paul Biba
Canada’s Quill & Quire Blog has a short article by Nathan Whitlock in which he says:
Peter Darbyshire, author and columnist for Vancouver’s The Province, has decided to set free his first novel, Please, by making it downloadable from his website. Please, which was originally published by Raincoast in 2002, won the ReLit Award for Best Novel, as well as the K.M. Hunter Award for Best Emerging Artist. On his blog, Darbyshire writes that he decided to make the book freely available because copies of it were becoming hard to come by through traditional retail channels. (Though it is still technically available online at Amazon and elsewhere.)
Nathan then goes on to say that “More and more authors, such as Cory Doctorow, are opting for the free route right off the bat, figuring that a wide readership is better than the paltry income likely to come from a regular publishing deal. “
Cory responded to this in a comment: “I don’t figure ‘that a wide readership is better than the paltry income likely to come from a regular publishing deal.’ Nothing could be further from the truth! Instead, I figure that giving away e=books sells more of the print books that I sell through my regular publishing deals with publishers such as Tor (my novels), Avalon/Perseus (my short story collections) and IDW (comic books).”
November 13th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Oh right, you mean like a public library does? Allowing people free access to the books seems to help author sales…
November 13th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
At least for works in certain genres and media it does. It certainly seems to sell more science fiction and fantasy novels—not just for Cory Doctorow, but for Baen and Tor and others who’ve tried the experiment.
But for other works, it’s less certain. A free e-version of reference books, for instance, that are generally only consulted instead of read straight through, might well make buying a printed one unnecessary. And why would someone buy a printed recipe book when he could just print out a recipe from the e-version and use?