Yet Another Author Discovers Giving Away Ebooks Increases Sales

from the more-and-more-and-more dept

We've been posting a ton of examples lately of authors giving away ebooks for free and seeing that it noticeably increases sales of their actual books. By this point, I'd think that such stories are old hat and don't need to be repeated. But if you look through the comments on some of our posts, you'll find people who insist that this doesn't work or that we haven't shown any examples. One commenter recently said that there's no proof that this works unless "50% of publishers adopt such a model." So, for the time being, here's yet another example, as pointed out by my colleague, Chris. SciFi author John Scalzi just participated in publisher Tor's recent effort to offer up free ebooks, and discovered an almost immediate boost in sales. He admits that there could be other factors involved, but tries to account for all of them, and concludes that it's almost definitely the free ebooks that are driving the noticeable increase. So, here we are. Yet another example of it working. How long until someone points out in the comments that this, too, is a special case? Just how many special cases do we need to show before people recognize that this model does work? Update: Just for clarification's sake, I should note that Scalzi has apparently been giving away free stuff for years, and seems a bit upset that I implied otherwise. Sorry about that. Doesn't change the point of the post, of course. If anything, it would seem to enhance the point.

Filed Under: books, ebooks, free, john scalzi