Ask Slashdot: Funding Models For a Free E-book?

danspalding writes "I'm an adult education teacher in SF who wrote an e-book about how to teach adults. It will be available to download for free in January 2013. I Kickstarted enough money for editing, design and publicity, but not enough to pay me anything up front. I'm considering making a $1, $10 and $25 version available from Amazon as a way for folks to donate money to me, as well as a straight up PayPal link on my site. Is it possible to produce quality material for teachers to download for free in a way that's economically sustainable? Might readers accidentally pay for a copy without realizing there's a free download and get angry? And where should I host the free-to-download version?"

Comments

Check Pro-Git

[Pastis]

Free ebook, paying print version. http://git-scm.com/book

10 ways to monetize ebooks

[All_One_Mind]

I've made some spare money writing and marketing ebooks, but I moved onto greener pastures long ago. Some of the business strategies or ideas I have had monetizing ebooks:

• 1. Embed affiliate links to other books within the ebook
• 2. Offer additional content that supplements the ebook for a small donation
• 3. Require an email address/newsletter subscription before sending the free ebook, and then try and monetize through the newsletters
• 4. Offer physical copies of the book for a fee
• 5. Break the ebook up into smaller parts for an email newsletter series, and monetize in the newsletter
• 6. Pledge to write additional material as certain fundraising goals are met
• 7 .Turn the ebook into a mutipage website and populate with Google Ads
• 8. Sell resale rights, PLR, etc.
• 9. Initially sell the ebook only, and then unlock it for free for all people after $xxxx has been raised
• 10. Write additional non-free books/ebooks and then use your free ebooks to advertise the pay books

Now I know many of these are not applicable to OP, but it's what worked for me before I moved onto writing GPL software instead of ebooks.

offer a printed version

[davecb]

O'Reilly discovered that people will pay real money for a printed copy even when they get an electronic copy of the book free. "Using Samba" was and is distributed free with the "Samba" SMB server program, through the initiative of my editor, Andy Oram, and the book went from a distant third on the subject to one of the company's top sellers of the year.

--dave