The Modern Publishing Ecosystem of Freebies

Now I'll ramble on about free books and stuff like that, so you'll probably want to hit the back button and bypass this...

Here's a nice ranticle about the Amazon e-book returns policy from Jenny Trout.

There's always someone out to game the system or take advantage of any opportunity to make or save a buck at someone else's expense. (If this Darwinian observation wasn't essentially true about humans, we wouldn't have any gazillionaires in the world, but we might have civilization instead.)

There has been a lot of press lately about declining book sales, especially in e-books. I'm not surprised, I guess. Things are very competitive out there in the cruel world of publishing and every author is trying to "make it". Naturally authors try just about every means at their disposal short of breaking into peoples' homes and leaving their books lying about on the sofa or force-feeding them to readers in strait-jackets. Nowadays the means include giving away loss-leaders and/or lowering prices to sea level or below.* The ecosystem is rife with free samples, and people pick them up. Hasn't anyone in the publishing business really noticed this?

I can only speak from my own experience about buying habits, but I'm pretty sure they have changed radically in the last couple of years. (And I'm usually a "late adopter" of technology.) Each year I read cover-to-cover probably 40-50 or so books, even though I may buy more, especially reference materials and folk-tale collections.

But I almost never buy a novel on paper anymore. I love paper and I certainly intend to continue pushing out my own books as paper editions because they're nice. But for read-once genre novels, I have to confess that I mostly e-read.

But also, these days, I hardly ever seem to buy novels. I'm inundated with free samples everywhere I look, and with the plethora of new-to-me authors to sample for free, is it surprising to anyone in the industry that I take advantage of cost-free reading? Today I downloaded six free books and added them to my pile of stuff I may someday read...

It's not just me, of course... It's everyone who reads e-books. (This is why SROP would have already gone out of business if it were a business and not a mere hobby that costs far more to maintain than it brings in.)

I used to buy loads of novels (particularly mysteries) mostly new, in paperback. There were a few series that I collected assiduously. Unfortunately Elizabeth Peters is no longer with us, or I'd probably be buying Amelia Peabody e-books, but I already own that entire series in paperback. Recently I switched to buying e-books of one series: I.J. Parker's Akitada books, starting when she went indy).

For authors who fall into the "buy on sight" or "buy a series as volumes come out" classes, I'm willing to pay quite a bit more than zero. But my limit is about eight dollars. If an e-book is more expensive than that, I'm most likely to skip it, or buy a used paperback. I hate depriving living authors of an extra buck they might have had, but I really will not pay more than ten dollars for an e-book, unless the author is already a personal friend whose work I want to support whole-heartedly. (That is a non-empty class, by the way.)

These days there are so many new-to-me authors giving away loss-leaders that it's become something of a habit to just graze from the Bookbub listings for free books. Not even those for a buck or two; just the free ones. I have now about 500+ novels in my Amazon/Kindle library, most of which were free... And most of which I haven't (yet) read. Some I may never read, for one reason or another--for example, if they appealed to me vaguely or made me half-smile when I picked them up, but have never since then risen to the level of something I want to dive into more than whatever else is sitting around within easy reach...

And then there's Smashwords with their super-sale in July. One day recently over the holiday here in the USA, I sat down to look at only the July free offerings at Smashwords. There are over 4,520 of them available for free. Yes, I downloaded a few of those and may read them someday... Oh! Before I forget... The entire set of Lyn Hamilton's eleven Lara McClintoch Archaeological Mysteries is available for free this month... (Well, except for the first one, which must have been overlooked but is only two bucks.) Yes, I took the opportunity to bag them all, even the non-free one, just in case I love them when I someday begin to read them... Will I love them? I don't know, but now I have them, just in case. :-)

It's rare to find a new author so compelling that I obsessively start to buy a series or individual books after having picked up one for free. But there are some examples... (Oh, this doesn't include everyone, it's just a tiny sampling.) L.B. Hathaway, Toby Neal.

I intend to buy series books from some authors like that, as the books come out, and I'm willing to pay a few dollars to get them, but I got the first one through discovery as a free sample. So these are examples of successful freebies that resulted in sales and presumably cups of coffee for authors.

And last but not least, some authors found through GR, whose books I now buy on sight or pre-order at any price. LOL, even if, on some occasions, I've read the books first in beta form): Rowena Wiseman, Sophia Martin, Amber Foxx

-----

* In case you're wondering, SROP conclusively proved there is no life below sea level when we failed to give away any books, even when we offered to wrap them in money.