Discover more from Project: Shadow

Are you ready for an adventure beyond your wildest dreams? Dive into my electrifying space opera, mystical urban fantasy, and epic fantasy stories, and discover the unseen wonders of Writing, Fandom, and Fiction as seen through metamodern eyes.

Free Ebooks boost Sales, but How?

Charlie Dorsett (they/she)

Jun 5, 2009

Image via Wikipedia

Victoria found this interesting Fact about giving away a free eBook of your novel.

... a doctoral student, John Hilton, is collecting data on the sales impact of ebook giveaways...

...While four of the five Random House books Hilton identified showed an uptick in sales post-e-version, 20 of 24 Tor titles showed a decrease. Why the difference? "One possible explanation is that by making the free books available for only one week a different dynamic was present [for Tor] than when the books were made permanently available [by Random House]," Hilton says. "The opportunity for word-of-mouth to spread about the free book may have been significantly diminished in the model used by Tor (Writer Beware Blogs!)."

Permanently Free= Word of Mouth

The study is finished but the difference between permanently giving away a free eBook increases sales while a limited time free eBook didn't. The trick to building any audience or community is word of mouth. My question is, how much do you giveaway? I am not talking about whether or not to give away the whole book or just a sample, I am more interested in when is a good time to start giving away the book.

Writing in public

I have been toying around with the idea of writing a book in public. I am in the process of developing a new novel, and I have been thinking about making the development and the writing public. The question for me is how. I can see a couple options:

Set up a free blog and allow anyone to read and comment on the ideas, outlines and drafts.
Set up a paid blog and allow anyone who preorders the book to read and comment on the ideas, outlines and drafts.

I like the second model best because it would weed out people who do not like my work at all, and it would allow my fans to be a part of the the writing process. I do not usually release hardcovers, so maybe I could make a signed hard cover the preorder book. Maybe I could even set up a gold membership that would offer an exclusive copy of the prewriting in print too.

What do you think?