{"id":456,"date":"2011-05-09T13:08:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-09T13:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bestfantasynovel.com\/2011\/05\/09\/does-giving-away-free-ebooks-work\/"},"modified":"2011-05-09T13:08:00","modified_gmt":"2011-05-09T13:08:00","slug":"does-giving-away-free-ebooks-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/2011\/05\/09\/does-giving-away-free-ebooks-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Giving Away Free Ebooks Work?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/lifestyle\/style\/novel-rejected-theres-an-e-book-gold-rush\/2011\/04\/09\/AFZdqb9F_story_2.html\">Novel Rejected? There&#8217;s an Ebook Gold Rush!<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p>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:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cWe have less than 50 people who are making more than $50,000 per year. We have a lot who don\u2019t sell a single book,\u201d says Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.com, a Web site that helped launch indie publishing.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen I load all our numbers on a spreadsheet, it\u2019s the typical power curve,\u201d he says. \u201cOn the left, there\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Belle, the Amazon veep, adds,\u201cThere are a lot of books, even low-priced, on Kindle that are not selling at all.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>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&#8217;s taken 25 days to achieve those 500 downloads\/5 sales.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m still hovering between those who haven&#8217;t sold a single book and those who are making more than $50,000 a year. And $50,000 a year isn&#8217;t that much. As my husband likes to remind me, it&#8217;s not much return on investment for a graduate degree.<\/p>\n<p>http:\/\/www.sfnovelists.com\/2011\/05\/07\/experimenting-in-ebooks\/#comment-10742<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Novel Rejected? There&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}