![]() Comparing their sales to the numbers provided by colleagues suggests that they perform somewhat better than other books from similar writers at similar stages in their careers. There's no empirical way to prove that giving away books sells more books-but I've done this with three novels and a short story collection (and I'll be doing it with two more novels and another collection in the next year), and my books have consistently outperformed my publisher's expectations. There are two things that writers ask me about this arrangement: First, does it sell more books, and second, how did you talk your publisher into going for this mad scheme? In an age of online friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word of mouth. Nothing sells books like a personal recommendation-when I worked in a bookstore, the sweetest words we could hear were "My friend suggested I pick up." The friend had made the sale for us, we just had to consummate it. It is so fluid and intangible that it can spread itself over your whole life. It begs to be converted to witty signatures at the bottom of e-mails. It wants to be copied from friend to friend, beamed from aĭevice, pasted into a mailing list. The thing about an e-book is that it's a social object. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I'm ahead of the game. ![]() But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. ![]() A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book-those are the lost sales. Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience. ![]()
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