Free digital books - why should anyone pay for your book?

Everyone bar the most extreme Analogue Activist can see that digital book sales will soon far outstrip revenues generated by hardbacks and paperbacks.

Good news for self-publishers like myself and a few million others. Or is it?

The way I see it is there’s weakness in numbers when it comes to self-published authors. With so many of us scribbling away and uploading our words to Amazon, Kobo and Draft2Digital, the market is saturated with works by authors 99.9% of the book buying public have never heard of.

Why should these people risk even 0.99 cents buying and trying our work when there are thousands of books by thousands of better known authors they can fill their preciously small amount of spare time reading?

To make someone want to pay for our work, we need to give them strong reasons to buy. Our covers need to be eye-catching and our opening few chapters need to be gripping, no, stunning, to hold their attention and get that cursor clicking on “buy”.

Or we have to bite the bullet and offer our novels for free. Yep. Free downloads. $0.00. 

No one likes giving away work they’ve spent the equivalent of six months of their lives crafting. But, as someone more wordy wise than I once said: I write perchance to be read.

If you write to be read, free could be the way to go to get your name known. If you write to make money, free could be the way to go to get your name known. Initially, anyway, until you can break out of a pack of wannabe writers that is millions strong and growing all the time, with words delivered in such a compelling order, you get your name known.

All this advice is freely given and, of course, feel free to totally ignore it.

Jon Lymon writes novels that are occasionally available for free, and usually available for $0.99.