Does Giving Away Free Ebooks Work?

Novel Rejected? There’s an Ebook Gold Rush! begins with a tale of an author who just tossed a few backlist titles online and suddenly started finding the cash rolling into her bank account.

After a few of those stories, they pause to announce in all caps, WE NOW INSERT THIS PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT BECAUSE WE DO NOT WANT YOU CALLING US WHEN YOUR e-BOOK TANKS:

“We have less than 50 people who are making more than $50,000 per year. We have a lot who don’t sell a single book,” says Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.com, a Web site that helped launch indie publishing.

“When I load all our numbers on a spreadsheet, it’s the typical power curve,” he says. “On the left, there’s a skinny area of the chart where people are knocking it out of the park. And then we have a very, very long tail off to the right, where some titles sell very few at all.”

Belle, the Amazon veep, adds,“There are a lot of books, even low-priced, on Kindle that are not selling at all.”

My own experience with offering a free loss-leader on Smashwords is that for every hundred free downloads of Initiate (Book 1), one person will buy Taboo (Book 2). So a 1% sell through. Not that great, considering it’s taken 25 days to achieve those 500 downloads/5 sales.

I’m still hovering between those who haven’t sold a single book and those who are making more than $50,000 a year. And $50,000 a year isn’t that much. As my husband likes to remind me, it’s not much return on investment for a graduate degree.

http://www.sfnovelists.com/2011/05/07/experimenting-in-ebooks/#comment-10742