Giving Away Free E-books as a Promotional Tool?

Does it make sense for an author to give away some books in the hope of gaining readers and sales of other books? Giving away a print book is pretty expensive but ebooks are fairly easy to give away at vrtually no cost. But is it a good idea?

There is no simple answer. It may worth trying for an unknown author just to get the book into the hands of readers with the hope that word of mouth referals will spread. If you are just starting out and have no readers then getting anyone to read your stuff is a plus. But there is not blanket right answer because each author has a different body of work and different goals for their writing.

So lets look at what some other publishers and writers are doing:

Baen Free Library - Free Baen ebooks can be downloaded. Several reasons are given but two really stand out: 1. give some exposure to lesser known and mid-list authors, 2. they prefer to give away the first couple of books in a series so that it will generate future sales of later volumes in that series. I have heard that indeed sales of books in a series have increased after the first one or two Baen volumes were given away for free. Baen has been doing this since 2000 without terminating the program so it must be working.

Author Cory Doctorow - Tor Books published the print version but with the publisher's permission Doctorow did two things:

1. Give the book away in ebook format for free -

Why am I doing this thing? Well, it's a long story, but to shorten it up: first-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers don't have a lot of promotional budget to throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on word-of-mouth.

2. Released it under the Creative Commons License -

I'm releasing the entire text of this book as a free, freely redistributable e-book. You can download it, put it on a P2P net, put it on your site, email it to a friend, and, if you're addicted to dead trees, you can even print it.

What he has done is give permission for that ebook to be freely copied and passed along. And note that he even suggests some ways to do that which helps spread that vital word of mouth referrals.

What strikes me is that an unknown author is competing against the known author for the readers limited time and for the limited money the reader has budgeted for books. If the reader to make a choice of spending $8 on a favorite author they know, or $8 on you, chances are they are going to go for the sure thing in the author they know.

So the challenge for the unknown author is in becoming one of those authors the reader already knows is good and is part of building your name as an author.

Only you can decide if giving away an ebook for free is worth trying for you. And only you can figure out how you want to try it, but it is something to consider.