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GiviNG it away
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Giving it Away
(Originally published in
Forbes,
December 2006.)
I’ve been giving away my books ever since my first novel came
out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money.
When my first novel,
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,
was
published by Tor Books in January 2003, I also put the entire
electronic text of the novel on the Internet under a Creative
Commons license that encouraged my readers to copy it far and
wide. Within a day, there were 30,000 downloads from my site
(and those downloaders were in turn free to make more copies).
Three years and six printings later, more than 700,000 copies of
the book have been downloaded from my site. The book’s been
translated into more languages than I can keep track of, key con-
cepts from it have been adopted for software projects, and there
are two competing fan audio adaptations online.
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. A tiny minority of downloaders
treat the free ebook as a substitute for the printed book — those
are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the ebook as
an enticement to buy the printed book. They’re gained sales. As
long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I’m ahead of the game.
After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost
me nothing.
The thing about an ebook is that it’s a social object. It wants
to be copied from friend to friend, beamed from a Palm device,
pasted into a mailing list. It begs to be converted to witty signa-
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