I’d love to know the mechanics of the process…

db

And it paid too, via donations to paypal. At this point, while still unpublished via paper, I have made enough in donations to pay for nearly a six month supply of gasoline. Which says a lot…I drive an F250.

Not bad for something given away free by an unknown author who lives in Alaska.

Basil

Had you written “Have you tried the library?” I would have simply related my sob story about the 1 SF book (which is true!). While I would (hopefully) never tell you what you “should” write on your own blog, you don’t get to decide how I should react to your communications to me.

I couldn’t (and still can’t) see any reason for you to be snarky to me unless I inadvertently pushed a button of yours in my first comment in the thread (if so, I apologise; I certainly had no intent to do so). If someone writes something on their blog that I think is stupid or wrong, I simply ignore it. There’s a hell of a lot of internet out there. Move on! But if someone addresses me in a manner I consider inappropriate, I’m more likely to respond.

At root, this is probably all down to vagaries of perception, limitations of text, and faux intimacies of online fora. I’m sure it’s the first time that’s ever happened. While I have no qualms (outside the hearing ranges of my mother-in-law and nephews) about profanity and think I escalated rather than initiated hostilities, your concern for my psychological well being is appreciated. I wish you well in the 999s.

Only time will tell, of course, but what may be going on now is a stepping-stone to a new attitude and we’ll see where it leads. Right now the ‘free samples’ take us straight to Amazon or a bookstore. I hope that remains the case, but everything seems to be changing, so you never know (it looks like Amazon would rather sell used books – or really, just handle the transaction between buyer and used book dealer)…

The idea of a Medici-like patronage system (or, as we have here in Canada, a government-grant supported system – which I mostly like) may render the reader a little too unimportant in the whole process – right now the only influence on what gets produced is by buying some and not others and I’d hate to lose that tiny bit of influence. I hope the new Medicis make good choices.

But, of course, like almost all writers these days I give away short fiction online in the hopes it leads readers to my novels (crime, not SF)

It’s early days, yet….

There are a lot of authors whose books I only read via the library – Harry Turtledove, Dean Koontz, and M.C. Beaton, for example, who are so damn prolific I’d go broke if I bought them all. When I was a lad, a paperback was $1 (yeah, I’m old), and something in me rebels at paying $7.50 for a paperback.

More importantly, I enjoy their books but don’t really wanna own them forever. Too bad I can’t convince my wife to quit buying those !@*&#^ Nora Robbs…

Anyway, reading JDC’s post convinces me that we have an excellent local library, and I have thus far taken it for granted!

However it seems to me that the free to read != author unpaid issue is something that Eric Flint has addressed in part in his various “salvoes against big brother” columns at Jim Baen’s Universe.

He coined a concept of spillage to describe the fact that almost every successful sale involves the salesperson / company giving away test-drives, demos, trial periods, free samples etc. before closing the sale and that (duh) not every freebie given away results in a sale.

The transferal of that concept into books and particularly ebooks means that readers can expect to read a non-trivial chunk of an author’s work for free before they have to pay for it. However, as you note, for a smart publisher and successful author that doesn’t mean that the author won’t be paid because the publisher can expect to receive money from people who enjoyed the freebie and want more.

[I know you don't want to get sidetracked on to Tor's ebook strategy but the complaints from many of us (including me) indicate that Tor did a wonderful job of growing the market for their books/authors and then failed to follow through quickly enough with the right options for new readers to purchase more books and give Tor and its authors money.]

We just found out about it a few weeks ago and we’re thinking about doing a few posts on it ourselves first.

Lemons = lemonade.