For a long time, I’ve said that if I didn’t have to make a living at this writing thing, I would love to give all my books away for free. Well, for the month of January at least, I’ve decided to do just that.
Smashwords has a special pricing option that allows readers to set the price for your ebooks that they’re willing to pay. There is no minimum price, so you can set the price to $0 and download it for free. You can also come back and pay for the book after you’ve read it. Smashwords breaks down where the money goes, so you can see how much of it goes to the author. Smashwords pays authors better than any other site I’ve worked with, and also gives you the widest variety of ebook formats to choose from.
I started this experiment two weeks ago and didn’t say much about it, just because I wanted to see what would happen first. The response so far has been quite surprising. A lot of people have downloaded the books for free, but the people who are opting to pay have more than made up the difference. If things continue like this, I may just keep all my Smashwords books at Reader Sets the Price indefinitely.
So if you’ve got an account at Smashwords and you’d like to pick up some of my books, feel free to check them out! You can pay whatever you want for them, or download them for free and tip me later.
More than money, though, what I really need for my Smashwords books are reviews. It’s an unfortunate fact that people who download ebooks for free are more likely to leave negative reviews (and then download the rest of the books in the series they supposedly hate, leaving negative reviews on each one). If you have a Smashwords account and you’ve enjoyed any of my books, I would really appreciate it if you’d take a couple minutes to go over there and leave an honest review. I would actually appreciate reviews more than payment, so if you want to pick up one of my books that you haven’t read yet, leave a review on one that you have and we’ll call it even.
That just about does it. When January is over, I’ll write another blog post where I’ll detail my results.
Thanks for reading!
