page94
72
cory doctorow
tures at the bottom of emails. It is so fluid and intangible that it
can spread itself over your whole life. 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 consum-
mate it. In an age of online friendship, ebooks trump dead trees
for word of mouth.
There are two things that writers ask me about this arrange-
ment: First, does it sell more books, and second, how did you talk
your publisher into going for this mad scheme?
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 an-
other collection in the next year), and my books have consistently
outperformed
my
publisher’s
expectations.
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. But short of going back in time
and re-releasing the same books under the same circumstances
without the free ebook program, there’s no way to be sure.
What is certain is that every writer who’s tried giving away
ebooks to sell books has come away satisfied and ready to do it
some more.
How did I talk Tor Books into letting me do this? It’s not as if
Tor is a spunky dotcom upstart. They’re the largest science fic-
tion publisher in the world, and they’re a division of the German
publishing giant Holtzbrinck. They’re not patchouli-scented info-
hippies who believe that information wants to be free. Rather,
they’re canny assessors of the world of science fiction, perhaps
the most social of all literary genres. Science fiction is driven by
organized fandom, volunteers who put on hundreds of literary
conventions in every corner of the globe, every weekend of the
Content 2nd gal final.indd 72
7/4/08 9:56:48 AM