Here’s a blog post from Nathan Henrion, a midlist publisher who made a title available on Amazon as a free e-book. He reported seeing the sales rate of the second and third books in its series increase at a rate of 20 to 1. He says that digital sales make up 1/5 of the total sales of this particular series so far, and are growing.
Henrion writes:
Much of the talk by the big 6 publishers has been stress over cannibalization of print sales, or the idea of replacement sales, by ebooks. For midlist publishers such as ourselves, I believe we fight against substitution. We capture the “browser” market. If our title is not available or visible, a customer will simply substitute for another one in the genre. Free gave us the visibility that we could not purchase.
Funny how publishers just keep discovering this anew, isn’t it?
Further discussion by Mike Masnick at TechDirt, and Nate the Great on his blog The Digital Reader (formerly Nate’s Ebook News).
