Until a few years ago, the conventional wisdom was that posting your fiction on the web for free was the best way to assure that publishers would never want it, because publishers want something exclusive that nobody else has seen before.
This is why forums like Baen’s Bar, where works can be posted in the “slushpile” for criticism and consideration, require a sign-in, with userID and password. Even though it takes about thirty seconds to set up an account and anyone can do it, it’s a sufficient fig leaf that authors who post there can say their work has not been posted “publicly” to the Internet.
But over the last few years, that conventional wisdom has been eroding. There are a number of authors, most notably John Scalzi, who got their start by posting works online for free. And now io9 reports that Marta Acosta’s young-adult vampire novel, The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove, is set to be published in hardcover by Tor after being posted to Scribd, where it became the number-one downloaded (the article says “#1 selling”, but can you really call it “selling” if it’s available for free?) young-adult novel.
Of course, unlike Scalzi, Acosta is not a newly-discovered writer; she already has a successful adult vampire series, Happy Hour at Casa Dracula. The following she already had for that series may well have led to the success of Shadow Girl—adults do read young-adult novels, and vice versa.
And furthermore, this isn’t even a book that publishers were unaware of. Going back to what I said about the conventional wisdom, in this case the book had already been submitted to Tor, but was apparently languishing in the slushpile. Acosta said:
My book had been with Tor and a few other publishers since last October. We hadn’t heard anything back and I was beginning to despair. That’s when I put the book online as a free read. I don’t know that having it on Scribd inspired the offer, but I was able to get reviews that were presented to the editor who expressed interest. Also showing her the number of reads made a difference.
So here we have a case of a published author posting her new work that was already under consideration to the Internet for free where anyone can read it—and instead of making the publisher reject it, Tor only ended up wanting it more. So much for the conventional wisdom, hmm?
It’s also worth noting that, unlike The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, another book that went the free-publication-to-professionally-published-book route, Shadow Girl is still available free in its entirety as of this writing. Update: As of 7/15, it had been taken down.
(Found via TechDirt.)
heh. I suggested several months back that releasing first in e, to gauge interest, would be a smart strategy. One of the other commenters tried to shoot me down with her Nerf crossbow.
But I still think I’m right. If I were a publisher, *I* wouldn’t go to press with hardcopy ‘ex negativo’ if I had a way to test acceptance first.
I have read that remainders are a strong profit center for publishers, which would go away if they began ‘right-sizing’ their print-runs. but I’d bet that it depends on the remainders. Pretty sure remaindered copies of a diet book that never really caught on aren’t going to do much; and there’s an awful lot of seriously short life-cycle self-help-y material that gets published and goes nowhere.
Not on Scribd anymore. Bummer.
As of the 15th, the book has been deleted from Scribd
Asphalt, I agree the ebook-first approach is a good strategy and I think you will be seeing publishers experimenting with it. I have no idea where you got the idea that returns are a “profit center” for publishers. Reality is, publishers typically will try to sell those returns only after the book’s sales in stores have come to an end; the books sold that way end up in the dumb bins you see in supermarkets and the like. A publisher might get $1 from a commercial buyer of remainders … Which is better tha nothing, but far from a source of profit.