Positive impact of free books on for-fee books
Why do authors give away their books for free? Surely making a free online version available would do nothing but eat into for-fee print versions, right? Yet hundreds of authors — and a few publishing houses — are hoping that’s not the case.
Enter doctoral candidate John Hilton. His thesis is focused on the impact that free ebook versions have on existing book print sales. To get a baseline, he only looked at books where the for-fee print version was release before the free ebook version was made available. The logic here on the part of the publisher fails me, but I see why Hilton sought this out for his research. Baselines are important.
The results were mixed. Random House made give-away ebook versions of five of their titles back in early march. And while one of the books showed no sales — either before or after the freebie:
…the other four books all saw significant sales increases after the free versions were released. In total, combined sales of the five books were up 11%. Together they sold 4,633 copies the 8 weeks prior to being released free and 5,155 copies the eight weeks after being released.”
But Tor had different results when they gave away an ebook a week to members of their mailing list. It didn’t work out so well for the 24 books examined:
For the eight weeks prior to the free releases, the Tor books sold 21,824 copies while in the eight weeks after they sold 16,556, a decrease of 5,268, or 26%.
Though I’m no doctoral candidate, I’ll tell you what it means to me. If you’re going to give something away — tell everyone you can. Don’t hold back. Don’t limit how long it’s available. Don’t try and put artificial constraints on it. Let. It. Spread.
Read the full story on Bloggasm. Props to my pal Douglas E. Welch for letting me know about this via the New Media Interchange Google group.
