An author wrote to me recently asking about giving his ebook version away for free to build an audience, and presumably buyers, for a book. She cited an article by Cory Doctorow, a popular online personality and an editor of the well-known blog Boing Boing. In the article, Cory describes how he gives way the electronic version of his science fiction, and as a result has built demand for the print versions of his novels.

Cory claims within the article that he’s received 30,000 downloads of the free ebook in a single day, and up to 700,000 downloads over three years. It is not clear from the article if he has adjusted his download numbers to account for non-human programs (robots and search engine spiders) downloading the files. (ABC Interactive, the major organization that audits web site traffic for advertisers estimates as much as 25% of all web site activity is from non-human sources. One private consultant I know who processes logs for some major sites puts the number as high as 50%.) Even if we take the worst-case scenario, however, it is still a large number of real people.

But let’s take a deeper look at this…

Cory admits later on in the article that he has no way of knowing if it is helping book sales or not. He apparently has no system in place to tie free downloads to sales. In addition, he’s the editor of a very popular blog aimed at people who are likely to be sci-fi readers. So who is to say the popularity of his books are due to the act of giving the books away or the promotion of the fact on the blog, or, for that matter, any other promotion he or his publisher are doing? Hard to say without proper campaign tracking.

Cory argues in the article that by doing this he’s “building an audience”, but an audience for what? People who don’t think enough of his writing to pay him? That is, by his own admission, the bulk of the people who download the ebook.

I guess the part I’m struggling with intellectually is how do you create value for a book in the eyes of potential buyers if the author places no value on it by giving it away for free? Cory’s approach is the shotgun approach - let everyone see it and a small percentage will buy my book. It is the “fire hose” method of marketing. If you spray everyone in a room with a fire hose, you’ll eventually hit the few people you want to hit. However, I’m not convinced giving it all away for free is behind Cory’s success. And, he offers no direct evidence to prove it. Something is definitely happening in Cory’s case - his books are selling, but I don’t believe he has a handle on the dynamics of the situation yet.

A good analogy for this might be the shareware model of software - try it for free, and pay if you like it. But I think it has been well-proven that most people won’t pay for something if there is no incentive to pay for it.

So how do you let people try your book, but still encourage them to eventually pay you for it? One way is in the packaging of the information.

The software industry does it by packaging products as trialware - giving you a fully-functional version of the program, but putting a time limit on how long it works without paying a fee.

If information is available online, it’s often easier to buy the printed book than to find and read all the text on a web site for free. One BookLocker author discovered this firsthand. His web site contained most of the information in his book, but not in a very organized manner. When he did organize the site, his book sales actually dropped. So he went back to a somewhat disorganized site and his book sales went back up. It was easier for people to just buy the book, rather than spend the time picking through the site to find the info they needed.

That was for a non-fiction book, though. So what is the equivalent exercise for a novel?

Doug Clegg, a well-known horror author, wrote some of his books in installments that he then emailed to a group of readers each week. In essence, he serializes each chapter through email over many weeks. People buy the books at the end (nice, hardcover editions, too) because they were part of its creation process. And readers who weren’t there for the novel’s creation buy the finished book because they don’t want to spend the time reading through each weekly email installment - the only way they can get it for free.

For the new fiction author, perhaps giving away the first novel or two is a viable way to build an audience. But you need some sort of mechanism to reach those people later, when it is time to sell them novel number three.