“What I do find interesting is that giving away a book free seems to have had about the same impact on my novel’s sales as getting nominated for a major award in terms of direct sales.” – Novelist Tobias Buckell, whose Crystal Rain was given away by TOR to promote sales of other books such as Ragamuffin.
Detail: You need to read the Buckell item above to get the full context, but among other things he writes of Ragamuffin sales, as depicted on a graph: “That yellow jump in sales is a 400% increase…”
At the same time I continue to wonder if this is the way to go for every book, since the online readership isn’t always the same as the customer base of bookstores. What do do about a nonSF novel with appeal mainly to the older baby boomers? Or one with long paragraphs that might display better on paper than on the screen?
Yeah, the thing that skewers these results is the fact that most success stories with giving away free ebooks center around the author either already being popular or having friends with popular blogs. In this case, it wasn’t necessarily just the free ebook, but also the fact that it was sent out on a mass mailing list via Tor. But I think this makes a good argument for why the bigger publishers should try pushing free ebooks more often. It’d be interesting if they do it with the first book in a series once the sales have stagnated in order to boost the sales of the second book in the series.