An Experiment on Giving it All Away

My life as an "indie" writer has been more or less without surprises. I knew when I uploaded a few short stories and a novel onto Amazon and Smashwords, I wasn't going to get rich. And I was right. I haven't. Not even close. Not even not even close.



I can name a number of reasons for this. Namely, I haven't been much of a salesperson. In this vast sea of Amanda Hocking hopefuls, it takes a lot to stand out, and although I've followed a lot of the recommended techniques, it hasn't been quite enough. But success in this field also takes a lot of luck. And while I've had a satisfactory number of downloads (satisfactory in that the downloads are roughly in proportion to the amount of effort I've put into promoting myself), I haven't exactly had what Malcolm Gladwell would call my "Tipping Point."



Still, I've been content with my performance. I have plans to add more to my online library over the next several months, and I'm feeling optimistic about the future. The question has now mainly become one about pricing. I've always felt my price points were directly in line with people's expectations of what they think is a fair price for downloadable content. $.99 for short stories, $2.99 for novels. Any more than that, and people will generally start to hesitate. It doesn't matter what I think my work is ACTUALLY worth (I think it's worth more than what I was already charging, but so what?). It's what people are willing to pay for it. Amazon knows this, and it's why they're tops in the business right now. They deeply discount their products to bring in more customers, and it works.



There's also the fact that people largely don't like to pay for downloadable content at all if they don't have to. The ones who do pay have to be a particular brand of passionate not only about reading, but about the future of e-books.



You can throw Dean Wesley Smith algorithms in my face all you want, but the truth is that most people don't perceive digital things as tangible, and most people will only pay real money for tangible objects. You can throw up all the iTunes references you want. "But Allie, people pay for $.99 music all the time!" That may be so, but get back to me when books have become about as obsolete as music CDs. How many people do you actually know who still buy music CDs? Compared to people who buy books vs ebooks. Exactly.



And that's without even getting into the fact that many people who download content are basically pirating it. Again, the lack of a price tag = more appealing for a generation of people who don't believe they should have to pay for digital content. This has never been more true to me than in the last week, when I started giving my work away as part of the Smashwords Summer Sale.



In doing so, I have discovered that there is a great demand for my work. In the first 24 hours of giving away my short stories, I'd made more sales than I had in three months. Did I care? Hell no. I loved it! And every day since then, I've been selling an average of twenty stories a day. Some days are more, some days less. Yesterday was close to fifty, and the numbers are on an upward trend. Stories that were once my lowest sellers are now my highest.



I didn't want to stop there. It was only my short stories that were free. My book, I had marked down to $1.49. But that still wasn't really selling as well (at least on Smashwords... my novel sales have generally been much higher through Amazon). So I decided today to make that one free as well. Within hours, the sales of that book have more than doubled.



This tells me a few things:



1. People are cheap bastards. Of course, I knew that already.



2. There is some kind of a demand for my work, or people wouldn't be downloading it the way they are.



Do I care that the income I could've been making over the last week might have paid this month's electric bill if only people weren't such cheap bastards? No, not really. Whining about that is about as futile as saying I wouldn't have inhaled that bug if I hadn't been breathing. Breathing is mandatory for living, and people will always be cheap bastards. The key is working with or accepting the consequences for those things now and again.



Besides, I never went into self-publishing for the money. I'm doing it for the exposure. Giving away some of my work for free is a valuable marketing tool. In letting the work speak for itself, and letting people have free access to it, I could very well build a following that I might never have if I'd kept everything behind a pay wall. The name recognition and brand building is worth far more in the long run than the measly double-digit quarterly royalty payments I've been receiving.



In fact, I'm considering keeping the bulk of my catalog free. It feels a lot better seeing one free download after another, even if they're free, than a stubborn trickle of paid downloads. I know a lot of my writerly peers will call me crazy for that, but I'm thinking about the long game, and in my opinion, if the story isn't making you any money after several months, why bother charging? I'd rather the reader know my name. It isn't an instant gratification kind of thing, but I feel this has the potential to deliver a much huger dividend down the road.