Don’t give away your whole book for free. That’s what Ficbot warned new authors yesterday, and I agree.
Generous samples are cool. Same for onscreen viewing of the complete book, as opposed to actual freebies of the full files.
But should a writer offer a free download of the whole bleepin’ book if it isn’t the first in a series or whatever? No, in most cases. I’d respectfully disagree with Cory Doctorow on that issue.
Meanwhile there’s the related matter of freebies in e-stores. Shortcovers President Michael Serbinis notes, in an upbeat interview with The National Post, that customers want to “try something for free that is a ‘hot’ book. So you can try Pride and Prejudice for free, as you can on other services, because that’s a public domain book. But people wanted … a Stephen King book for free. Free sells, so to speak…[They] want to try it and [they] want to try it for free, and not just Pride and Prejudice, because everyone has that…
“At least what we’ve seen so far is that people who do have that first good free experience with Pride and Prejudice or some other public domain title, those that become purchasers purchase a lot … I think pricing is a whole topic of discussion that is not figured out. Publishers are spending a lot of time on it. We’re learning a lot … What we’ve seen is that people who do have a good first-time experience have no problem buying, and buying again.”
The Post interview, by the way, covers a bunch of topics and includes Serbinis’s observations that Shortcover sales have greatly exceeded expectations. Well worth reading in its entirety. Another excerpt:
“…anytime Apple burps these days everyone’s like, ‘Oh my God, they’re making a reader. It’s going to be a Kindle killer.’ I guarantee you Apple’s not thinking of it as a reader, as a Kindle killer. They see it as much bigger than that. As a multi-purpose device that can let you play games, watch movies, let you watch music videos, read magazines … it won’t be a reader first.”
Exactly. But as with the iPhone, reading will be an important app.
Friendly advice to Shortcovers: Please stop referring to ePub as a “free and open eBook” standard without mentioning without mentioning that proprietary DRM turns ePub in effect into a proprietary standard. Many and perhaps most of your ePub books are DRMed—hence, the need to make this distinction.
