Discussion: Today, Mike Stackpole, referring to a recent Publisher’s Weekly column, has a bone to pick with some of the hype around Cory Doctorow’s expertise as a free digital media evangelist, specifically the lack of numbers supporting the fact that the free ebook giveaways do indeed increase the print sales, and the flaw in the definition of terms about Cory’s most recent free vs pay experiment.
Mike Stackpole has also blogged about this on his website:
Deconstructing Cory Doctorow’s “Experiment”
What is Cory Doing Right?
Interview: Tom Lloyd, author of the “Twilight Reign” series, joins Mike and Mike to talk about the latest book in the series, The Grave Thief.
Tom tells about how this story turned into 5 volumes, discovering the story along the way, and standing at the starting gate, staring at the mountain that is the start of a 200,000 word novel waiting to be written, and of course, the plethora of new story ideas that just won’t leave a writer be.
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First of I would like to thank you for your podcast. I will probably be one of the first to say this but I happen to like the writing of Cory Doctorow and though I am looking forward to his new project and seeing how the sales are on it. I don’t think that it will solve much when it comes to the question wether giving away your stories leads to greater sales. Mr Doctorow is an established writer and has a following already so his numbers will tend towards more sales then not.
I do think that there are better indications of the power of giving your work away in the other that you mention in Sigler, Hutchins, and Lafferty a list to which you could add Harwood and Melzer ….
I do see it as a viable way to gain a fandom that will be more likely to purchase but even that is yet to be seen in the cases above… Personally I would like to see an more relative unknown do it now to see if their voice will even be noticed in the amount of content that is now out there – If I had content to market I would do it but Hell I can’t even get traffic to me blog….
Again thanks for the thoughts about Cory – I had not read the PW article and I don’t think his “experiment” is a valid one but will watch it…