Does giving away free stories boost sales?

I can offer no evidence, but speaking as a reader, it would make me more likely to purchase a book if I had read and enjoyed the writer's freebies.

1. Because I've already seen the writer's skill, style, and characters, and decided whether the writer was appealing to me
2. After a coupla freebies I start to feel like I owe the person something, and should support the generous writer with some money
3. Particularly if the writer is posting freebies in some interactive manner, so I could feel like I was part of a community, and thereby got a little invested in "seeing my cyber-friend's work do well."

posted about 13 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Lauren Ipsum‭

2098 reputation 13 1143 397 1

Tread with caution. A lot of caution.

Free stories to promote the author is a marketing strategy. As such, there are situations where it can be wonderful; situations it can be disastrous; situations it can be utterly harmless and entirely insignificant.

I think these are the central questions you've got to ask yourself when considering writing freebies for the web:

• Is this webpage likely to gain more exposure than the story would get if I sold it to available, attainable markets? If it's not - you've gained nothing.
• Am I certain this story is of high enough quality to represent my work positively and enticingly to the outside world? If you're not - your free pieces may drive readers away. Recall also that anything you post on the internet is basically going to stay there forever. You'd better be sure.
• How do I expect readers to come across my free offerings? The web is full of free fiction. Most of it is sheer drivel. Unless you promote your free fiction somehow, there's no reason to think anybody will find it, come looking for it, or pass it on to friends.
• What non-free writing of mine are the free pieces promoting? If you can't point easily to precisely what works of yours you expect the reader of the free pieces to march out and buy, you can't expect the readers to bother and figure out for themselves how to send you some money. You've got to be clear, at least to yourself, on what it is you're promoting.

The most likely result of publishing pieces online is that nothing in particular will happen with them. They will likely fall somewhere between "nobody will read them because they'll never hear of them" and "some people will read them, enjoy them to some extent, maybe share with friends, but they won't be enthusiastic enough to go out and hunt for the author's other stuff." At the higher end of the spectrum, you've got "a lot of people who read this might be more favorably inclined to buy something of the author's if they run into it in the future." For most authors, that doesn't get them very far towards where they want to go.

Here are the situations where I think publishing free stories online sounds like a good marketing strategy:

• The free work is intrinsically linked to the promoted work (e.g. same characters, same setting). The free work basically serves as a direct teaser, ad, or prologue for the larger work. Sometimes, an author will even rework an extract of a larger work as a stand-alone story for this purpose.
• The author is established enough to attract some interest from readers, and has a fair number of works available for purchase. Visitors to the author's website are people who have read one or two things by the author, and are interested in finding out more; free stories are a great way to encourage this most welcome interest.
• The author believes he has enough existing fans (or can entice some) to spread around his free stories, eventually raising general awareness of the author.
• The author intends to devote substantial energy and effort into promoting his work; the free stories serve as content he can point people to, and come as a part of a wider promotion/marketing/content-producing effort.

That's where I'd see free stories as being really useful. If you're not in any of those situations, you've got to ask yourself very seriously just how you expect these free stories to make themselves useful - particularly contrasted with the option of receiving both pay and publication.

A really important note: you can look for free online magazines, and try to sell some work to those. That gets around almost all the pitfalls I've touched upon here, while leaving you with a freely available story you can link to, and that adoring fans can share around. That might be a good compromise. Another option is trying to negotiate, when you sell your work, that after a certain amount of time you get to publish your story free on your webpage (or link to it on the publisher's webpage). Not as odd as you might think - since they want the publicity too.

posted about 13 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Standback‭

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