Tor.com: Gaiman and Doctorow discuss giving it away
Mur Lafferty has a post on Tor.com about the Worldcon panel where Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow discussed how giving away works for free helped them sell more copies. (They also have audio of the panel for download—which I won’t link directly here for the same reason I don’t hotlink images. Go to tor.com, read and download for yourself.)
Gaiman discussed the fun he had “in my own slow way nudging HarperCollins out of the stone ages and into the dark ages” with the free time-limited giveaways of American Gods and Neverwhere e-books. (“Dark ages” is right. I stand by what I said in a prior post that a time-locked, DRM-crippled “freebie” isn’t a true “freebie” at all—though I will admit that I soon wished I had been more diplomatic in how I said it.)
He has since gone this one better, by placing a video of himself reading the Hugo-winning The Graveyard Book on-line in its entirety. Says Gaiman:
Whenever I notice that [The Graveyard Book] is slipping down the Amazon ratings…I just go onto Twitter and say, ‘You know you can watch the entire thing for free,’ and then the Amazon ratings will go up. It has been out in the world for forty-three weeks, and for forty-three of those forty-three weeks it’s been in the top ten of the New York Times Bestseller list. So I don’t believe we have lost a single sale.
It’s gratifying to see how much attention the positive effects of giving freebies away have been getting lately. Who knows, maybe there will soon be even more of them?
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