Sunday 28 July 2013

Free? Free? FREE?

What is this free of which you speak? The days you get to price your book at zero on Amazon's KDP Select. (See link for a blog post I wrote a while back explaining how it works). That means you get zero, zilch, nada for each and every "sale".

Why would I want to give my work away for free? Authors say making the first book in a series free generates sales of subsequent books. That may indeed be true for them and if so, I'm happy for them. But I just can't get my head around the concept. I don't want to just sell book 2 (and book 3 soon) of my crime thriller series - I want to sell all 3 books. If I want to make one free, I'll do it when I want and for as long as I want - via Smashwords, which will let me set my own prices.

My books aren't exactly expensive at full price. I work hard to write them - hundreds, if not thousands of hours. I want people to make a decision to buy and hopefully read my books, not download a freebie and probably never look at it. My ebooks cost less than the price of a cup of coffee. Anybody who doesn't consider that one of my books is worth the price of a cup of coffee is not my target audience.

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