My friend Brian wrote up a pretty interesting post recently about how giving away your works for free can drive sales, and while I agree with that thesis for the most part, I do still have a doubt or two. Mostly, those doubts come from the fact that the people who you hear success stories from are generally already quite well known. Certainly, that was the case for Monty Python when they started giving away skits. It works quite well for Cory Doctorow as well, but he’s fairly well known. I wonder how well it works, though, for those who don’t have the luxury of preexisting fame.
The Monty Python case has another significant difference from publishers giving ebooks away, and that’s that Monty Python was only posting individual skits, not whole episodes. Publishers could do something very similar by releasing only the first chapter or two of novels for free, a la Shortcovers (a site I’ve mentioned previously), but that may not drive sales the same way.
A final area of concern with giving away ebooks is that if Reader technology becomes so user-accepted that it becomes the dominant method for reading, won’t releasing ebooks for free in order to drive print sales be fairly pointless? Granted, this will probably not happen in the near future, but it may happen sometime in the next 20 years or so. If it does, I think publishers will have some serious rethinking to do, and will essentially have to reinvent the industry. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to be a part of that.
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I think that some of it has to do with what the goals of the IP in question are. Granted a famous person or group giving away some stuff could actually drive sales for existing well-known products, but what about using free stuff to promote lesser-known services? What about a fantasy or sci-fi book that has a lot of supplemental material that the author made while writing. I’m thinking of the vast notebooks that an author would have detailing the 30 year war that happened prior to the storyline, history of races, spellbooks, whatever. These things could be used to build up readership with the ultimate goal being the release of a book. Additionally, ebooks could be free, but the book could contain more material, be printed exquisitely (for the book-o-phile), or just be plain badass.
I do agree though that as the technology gets more widespread and embedded in every day life the nature of giveaways will change slightly. But I think that there will be more chapter giveaways (a la Itunes), and hence, more 1 and 2 chapter hooks, further changing the structure of the “successful” book.
Oh, I definitely agree that giving away added our value material is a great way to market. I was mostly just playing devil’s advocate for the idea that maybe giving your base content away for free won’t work so well for people who aren’t already known.