Sharing Doesn't Hurt

Freeptop writes "Here's a fun followup to an old slashdot article: Eric Flint just posted another Prime Palaver article on the Baen Free Library. In this article of his, he talks about the effects of posting his books for free on the library. Specifically, he uses his own royalty statements to show that sales for his books have gone up whenever he has made them available for free. As usual, Mr. Flint writes a well thought out article demonstrating the pointlessness of encrypting e-books, and this time, he has proof to back up his assumptions."

Comments

Now, before you Napsterites respond...

[d.valued]

..there is a CRUCIAL difference between what this author did, the Smashing Pumpkins asked for on "Machina 2: The Machines of the Gods" (their last album which was released as 50 acetates to good friends and one Chicago radio station which MP#'d it and let it roll), the way the Grateful Dead dealt with bootlegs (trade 'em, don't sell 'em I think was the gist of it) and what a lot of file-traders do with Metallica, Boobie Spears, et al.

This guy owned the copyright to his works and chose to share. I like that. Now, the labels and/or the artists (depending on who owns the copyright) chose NOT to share.

Now, I've never used any such services, mainly because, quite frankly, most US music sucks thanks to the fact we have only five real record labels, and I prefer my criminality to be more significant, like d/l'ing DeCSS or otherwise defeating copyright controls.

Of course there's the most obvious way to benefit:

[Otto]

Series.

Most books I (and others I've spoken with) really enjoy tend to be parts of a series of novels. Trilogies, etc.

If you really want to avoid obscurity, make your first book as free as possible, sell it on the cheap, give the text away freely on the internet in every conceivable format, etc. Then sell the rest of the books via traditional sales methods.

Get 'em addicted, then jack up the cost. Hey, it works. Ask your local drug dealer. (What, you don't think books are addictive??!?)

Hard figures

[PCM2]

From the article:

I think my hard figures demonstrate how absurd that claim is. It does not follow that simply because a copy is available for free that sales will therefore be hurt. In fact, they are more likely to be helped, for the simple reason that free copies-call them "samplers," if you will-are often the necessary inducement to convince people to buy something.

I'm pretty skeptical that the figures he's citing -- "hard" though they may be -- actually prove anything about whether giving away books for free results in better sales.

On the one hand, his most convincing point is that "certainly giving books away hasn't hurt my sales any, even if it hasn't helped them." But he can't actually say that, can he? Maybe the increase in sales he noticed late in term is a result of exactly what he suggests elsewhere in his essay -- the fact that he's gained more publicity as a writer since the book first came out. In that case, isn't it entirely possible that his sales would have gone up even more if he hadn't given away free copies to a portion of his potential readers?

"But wait," you argue, "the reason he gained publicity is because he was giving the books away." But again, that's not going to be true for everyone, is it? Once every single author in existence is giving away books for free, we'll be at exactly the point we're at now, where the only people who get publicity are the ones who pay for it -- in terms of advertising, book tours, public speaking gigs, what-have-you.

This guy likes giving away books? Fine. He says it hasn't hurt him any. Fine. But his evidence isn't all that empirical. All he can really say is that even though he's giving books away, he's been satisfied with the sales he's gotten.

What's more, he could say the same if he was sending out promo copies of the dead tree version. This doesn't really say much at all about the glorious future of Internet-delivered media, from where I sit. It's just a cute experiment that one guy did. I'd like to see it reproduced by someone else -- maybe a few someones -- before really take any of it seriously.

textbooks; my experience as an author

[bcrowell]

I was interested in this:

... Charles Vest, president of MIT, as an aside mentioned that when college textbook presses (like the one at MIT) put up free e-text copies of their new textbooks at the same time they published the print version, sales of the print versions went UP.

If it works to increase the sale for things as over priced as the normal college textbook...

Does anyone know what the actual textbook(s) is he's referring to? AFAIK, my site The Assayer is the biggest catalog on the web of books that have been intentionally made free-as-in-something by their authors, and I don't have any of the examples he's referring to. I'd be grateful if anyone could reply here about what they are, so I can add them in.

What he's saying matches up perfectly with my own experience with self-publishing free books. My own books are free-as-in-copyleft, and are also for sale in dead tree format. I've done very little traditional promotion, and yet my books have been fairly successful, considering that it's not easy for a self-published author to break into the textbook market. As the author of the article points out, it's pretty hard to know for sure whether certain sales results are the result of any particular action, such as making books available for free in digital form. But one good indication is that the small amount of non-web promotion that I did (sending out free evaluation copies on CD) was nearly all in California, whereas none of the teachers who have adopted my books are in California.