I’ve been offering a much larger sample (75%) than almost any other Smashwords author that puts a price on their book.

Does that set a larger, deeper hook, or does it simply risk losing the reader before they get to the end of the sample? I don’t know, but I’m getting lots of downloads and reviews from folks who actually sound like they read the book.

I have a lot of respect for Doctorov and Flint, but in there case, the message is not the free book, the free book is a marketing gimmick to promote the paperback. What they’re (historically) counting on is that the bulk of the readers view books on a computer and will, once they’ve read a sample, purchase the paper books. I truly believe this particular model is past its expiration date. For most unknown readers, free simply sends a signal of not worth anything.

I also agree with Ficbot that samples are the way to go–and with Nagle that the trick is persuading readers to give up their time, not so much to give up the few bucks they’ll spend buying a book.

That said, I do believe in keeping books affordable.

Rob Preece
Publisher

Which is exactly why the sample can work better for some people—less time investment to figure that out

I am not knocking free books per se—I do download my share. I just don’t seem to be actually *reading* my share right now because I am prioritizing reading my paid-for content first.

I do make heavy use of Amazon’s ‘download a sample’ feature, but mainly as a memory tool. Those are books I’ve already decided that I eventually want to read. I download the sample to keep track of the title/author, and — just as importantly — to confirm that formatting is acceptable. I wouldn’t mind just ‘overbuying’ out of the gate — and I do to some extent — but I do worry about the forward-compatibility of my paid content, so try not to buy more than I can read within a reasonable period of time.

I know from personal experience I’m much less likely to read a free ebook by an unknown author than I am if I’d paid for it; this is simple psychology. If you pay for something, you’re going to want to read it, because paying not only represents a commitment – the handing over of actual hard cash – but also the willingness to justify that expense to yourself by reading the damn thing.

This is all particularly interesting to me since I’ve dipped my toes in the ebook waters by publishing an ebook by another writer (http://bit.ly/4GBjbB), partly because it’s terrific, but also partly because I want to see what happens to an ebook when it’s thrown into the cold, deep waters of the internet with a marketing budget of zero.

What I’ve learned is, people will indeed buy it. But those sales are directly linked to online mentions: post a link somewhere, anywhere – say in my signature when I put a post on mobileread.com, for instance – and the sales go up. Leave any mentions for a while, and the sales go down.

What I think *does* work in terms of free, or could work, is putting the entire text of the book online as a web page, as many have done. Not because most people are actually going to sit there and read the whole thing off the screen, but because it acts as an easily accessible preview of the entire book that can drive readers to some place like Smashwords where they’ll hopefully pay real money for the convenience of a more easily digestible format.