By
Chris Meadows
Cory Doctorow’s latest column in the Guardian talks about his practice of giving away free e-book versions of his print books, and his recommendation that others do the same.
Booksellers – I’m a former one myself – know that personal recommendations from friends are the best way to sell books – better than reviews, better than covers, better than store-placement. A publisher’s publicity and marketing for a book is an excellent way to get it into some readers’ hands, and the word of mouth enabled by freely copyable ebooks then acts as a force-multiplier to expand the publisher’s efforts. Whether your "natural" audience is small or large, free downloads generally expand it, by letting readers make informed guesses about who else will like it, and giving those readers a persuasive tool for closing the sale.
There’s not a lot that’s new in this column; the economics of giving e-books away has been debated for over ten years, and I am sure we have covered it plenty of times here. (Most recently, we mentioned the Tor.com blog post summarizing Cory and Neil Gaiman’s WorldCon panel about it.) The discussion after the article is interesting, however.
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