“Books are money!”
“If you don’t put a price tag on your books, no one will think they have any value at all and then they won’t read them!”
“You are devaluing your work and thus other authors’ work! No one will ever want to pay for books ever again!”
Maybe that’s all true. Maybe by putting my books up for free on my website, I’m dooming myself and my work. Maybe there will be loads of readers who decide that because they don’t have to pay for my book, it’s not worth anything.
Here’s the thing, though: No one really knows the best way to sell books anymore (well, maybe Brandon Sanderson, but most authors don’t have a massive dedicated fan base ready to buy literally anything he sells).
Traditional publishing is struggling to adapt to the wild west of the world of ebooks. According to Brandon Sanderson, at least half of the books that he sells now are in eBook format. People still buy hardcover and paperback, but more and more people are turning to eBooks and audiobooks that can be read or listened to on their phones.
Self-published authors are also struggling due to there being tons of new writers posting on Amazon and the flood of AI-written books that are clogging Amazon’s marketplace. Amazon advertising rates are beyond ridiculous–A single click on my ad might cost 50% or more of the total cost of the book, and it takes anywhere from 10-30 clicks to generate a sale. You might as well make a pile of dollars and light it on fire for how useful Amazon ads are right now. And without ads, your book is as good as sunk in the ocean of Amazon’s pay-to-play marketplace.
When the well-worn paths of success don’t work anymore, why should I stick to practices that don’t work? If I have nothing to lose, I might as well forge my own path. It might come to nothing and I might fail spectacularly, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take.
My main goal in writing these stories is to have people read them. Would I love to get paid for the work I put into them? Sure! Who wouldn’t? But it’s not the main goal. My husband has a good job that provides for our family, and I intend to go back to school to further my own job prospects after my children are all in school. I do not NEED for these books to provide income. (That’s something I fervently recommend to anyone who wants to become an author–Don’t quit your day job!)
When I heard about how webcomics put up their work for free and then offer the hard copies for a price, I thought, “Ah ha! I’ll try that!” After all, that’s essentially how I got hooked on many of my favorite authors. Most of them didn’t have free books on their websites, but I got their books from the library or from thrift stores and discount bins. The first three books I read of Brandon Sanderson’s were like that: Mistborn from the BYU Bookstore discount bin, Warbreaker on his website with interesting annotations in the margins, and a brick of paper version of The Way of Kings that I got at a thrift store. The author didn’t get more than a handful of pennies from me for those three books, but since then, I’ve gone on the buy most versions of most of his books, as well as higher tiers of his Kickstarter and Backerkit campaigns.
The final reason why I am putting my books up for free is because our culture is so focused on money and consumerism. Everywhere I look, there’s some influencer pushing makeup and hair products that cost 5-10x as much as my usual Walmart brand stuff, or authors who haven’t been successful with their own books promising that if you just pay them $2,999 in six easy payments that they’ll make you rich and famous, or ads clogging up every single website and YouTube video and Pinterest board so that you can’t hardly see what it was you were looking for in the first place. We’re getting lonlier and more depressed and wondering why we don’t have all the stuff that our neighbor seems to have.
I see so many people around me that don’t value books anymore. I know too many adults who don’t read for enjoyment, don’t know any of the classics, and struggle with literacy in general. It feels like a part of our global culture is dying as fewer people are willing to settle down with a book and read.
By offering my books for free, I am removing my books from that mess. eBooks can be read on your phone without cutting down a tree. You don’t have to buy it; you can just have it, and so can your friend and your cousin and your hairdresser. I do have a store where I put up fun paraphernalia that I design for my stories, but that stuff is just as much the result of me fan-girling over my story that anything else.