Giving It Away
Cory Doctorow: “I’ve been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money.
When my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor Books in January 2003, I also put the entire electronic text of the novel on the Internet under a Creative Commons License that encouraged my readers to copy it far and wide.
Within a day, there were 30,000 downloads from my site (and those downloaders were in turn free to make more copies). Three years and six printings later, more than 700,000 copies of the book have been downloaded from my site. The book’s been translated into more languages than I can keep track of, key concepts from it have been adopted for software projects and there are two competing fan audio adaptations online.
Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience.
A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book–those are the lost sales.
But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They’re gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I’m ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing.
Read more.
Photo by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Fred333 on October 29th, 2007 12:17 pm
I read the first book and I thought it was pretty good.
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