Author Scott Sigler is something of a trailblazer when it comes to online fiction, having self-produced and distributed his first books as free episodic audio podcasts. This gained him such a big following that one of the many publishers that had rejected him in the past suddenly sat up and took notice.
Crown Books is releasing Sigler’s next novel, INFECTED, but before doing so they’ve released a free pdf to download…but only for 4 days.
As Cory points out:
“Worse still: Crown is only making the download available before the book goes on sale! This is an act of massive goofiness. Here’s what this means: the book’s promotional download period ends before you can buy the book. If you download this book and love it, you can’t walk down to the bookstore and pick up a copy. Sure, you can pre-order it on Amazon, but I know from watching my affiliate link payments here on Boing Boing that ten times as many of you buy books that are on sale when I blog them than buy books that have to be pre-ordered. The Internet exists in an eternal NOW, and expecting someone who downloads a book to hold onto the impulse to buy it for four days is so unrealistic, it makes me suspect that this strategy was conceived of by someone who doesn’t actually use the Internet.”
I am with Cory here. I don’t understand Crown’s strategy at all. The theory behind putting out a free ebook alongside a for-fee print edition is that some people have found that it actually increases the sales of the print edition. It sounds a little counter-intuitive but there are plenty of reasons for this to be true.
A free edition is snapped up by the most hardcore fans who will be most likely to spread the word to the wider circle of readers needed to build satisfactory sales figures. A free edition is downloaded by a curious reader who would probably never pay to read the book but, having read this one for free and liked it is much more likely to go buy other titles from the same author.
If you believe this to be true, why release it for only 4 days? That’s not even enough time for word to spread properly that it exists at all. Not only that, but what is the legal status of the pdf that is now out on the internet. Will I be in trouble if I download it now and then send it someone else to read after the 4-day period is over?
This kind of behavior from big companies totally baffles me. I’d think they had some kind of consultants or maybe even just a smart intern to point out the flaws in their plan.
I mean, they could have just called me. I’m always happy to lend a hand.
For my money, ARGs as a way to deliver compelling storytelling and solid marketing seems like a slam-dunk, with the obvious caveat that they are incredibly complex and challenging to design and implement.
For now, I’m just going to keep pointing out posts of interest. In this case, the world-trotting Cory Doctorow has super kindly posted his notes from a talk given by one of the main ARG inovators, Elan Lee.
The notes are rough but there are some super cool nuggets:
"ARG: Edoc (Push)
* A clothing company
* Good looking clothes, every item has a secret (Edoc is CODE backwards)
* Find secret by folding, infrared light, washing, etc
* If you solve the shirt, you go to the website and a movie plays
* One movie/shirt
* The movies piece together a murder mystery, told exclusively through
clothing
* Started by designing an online story, but delivered the story offline by
pushing it out through clothes
* People who wear the shirts have a connection with each other
* When they pass in the street, they have a story to discuss"
So cool.
BoingBoing has a quick post about the on-going free book discussion:
“Bottom line: low-risk/low-cost books are how readers discover new authors, and the biggest threat writers face is the overall unpopularity of reading books, not people reading for free.”
They point to a post from Neil Gaiman, (who’s book, American Gods, is “available” for free online) who responds to an bookseller unhappy that Gaiman is allowing his book to be given away:
“The books you sell have “pass-along” rates. They get bought by one person. Then they get passed along to other people. The other people find an author they like, or they don’t.
When they do, some of them may come in to your book store and buy some paperback backlist titles, or buy the book they read and liked so that they can read it again. You want this to happen.
Just as a bookseller who regards a library as the enemy, because people can go there and read — for free! — what he sells, is missing that the library is creating a pool of people who like and take pleasure in books, will be his customer base, and are out there spreading the word about authors and books they like to other people, some of whom will simply go out and buy it.”
There are certainly similarities between the publishing industry and the music industry and it is interesting to see the responses from readers, authors, sellers and distributors as both groups are pushed into the digital age.
A couple of posts about the world of books caught my eye. First, over on BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow has a scathing review of Harper-Collins “free” version of Neil Gaiman’s book “American Gods”:
“I think that Harper Collins got this one wrong. They’ve put the text of American Gods up in a wrapper that loads pictures of the pages from the printed book, one page at a time, with no facility for offline reading. The whole thing runs incredibly slowly and is unbelievably painful to use. I think we can be pretty sure that no one will read this version instead of buying the printed book — but that’s only because practically no one is going to read this version, period.”
He goes on to say that, in fact, he was able to jump onto Google and locate a pirated version of the book online and download it to his computer in the time it takes the Harper-Collins page to fully load.
His point is that, as an experiment in the value of releasing a free digital versions of a book, this is a complete failure. As Mason points out many times in “The Pirate’s Dilemma”, you can’t compete with pirates if what you offer isn’t nearly as good as the pirated version. Just because the Harper-Collins digital version doesn’t charge you money to read it doesn’t mean it’s free. It’s completely chained to a cumbersome interface and impossible to enjoy properly.
In a similar vain, TechDirt has a cool look at another result of free digital releases.
“SciFi author John Scalzi just participated in publisher Tor’s recent effort to offer up free ebooks, and discovered an almost immediate boost in sales. He admits that there could be other factors involved, but tries to account for all of them, and concludes that it’s almost definitely the free ebooks that are driving the noticeable increase.”
In the interest of science, I headed over to Tor books to find out just what one had to do to get a free ebook. As it turned out, it wasn’t completely obvious on their homepage so I had to do a bit of digging. To get the free book the ask you to sign up for their newsletter – I tried to do that but the website just seems to be hanging…
The point is that this is more proof that the traditional distributors and distribution methods are changing and along with that is going to come a whole bunch of new ways to promote and sell “books” that might never actually be published in hard form.
Cory Doctorow over on BoingBoing has a look at what sounds like a very cool step in the world of game development:
“Eskil Steenberg is a solo game-developer who’s bent on creating an entire massively multiplayer online world single-handedly, using procedural generation techniques that cause the game to build itself by starting with clever rules and exploring them outwards.”
In addition to using mathematics and rules to sort of organically build the game outward, Steenberg is hoping to tap into a collective resource of other gamers to help the game grow.
“he intends to build the world into a kind of communal adventure, where gamers work together to furnish a central village, defend it from enemy attack, and explore the surround world and its many dungeons. Players will be able to do things like deform elements of terrain, allowing them to build tunnel networks or walls to defend their property.”
Should the game end up working out to be as cool as it sounds, major game developers who spend literally millions of dollars and man-hours to make a game will be quaking (pun intended) in their boots.
Wired’s Chris Anderson’s preview essay of his upcoming book FREE is getting a lot of attention (see BoingBoing) for starters). Considering he is the guy who wrote the extremely influential book The Long Tail it isn’t really that surprising.
Maybe because I am so deeply involved in the world of “new media” I don’t find his essay especially earth-shattering. His main point is that many things which once cost money are now free thanks to the internet, largely due to the fact that processing power, storage, etc, has become nearly free.
Of course, “free” doesn’t always mean without cost. Anderson notes that much of the so-called free content we enjoy online is being paid for by advertisers. We end up paying with our attention and time and focus. What happens when the “cost” of bad advertising outweighs the value of the attached content.
Anderson says:
“There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.”
This is what many brands ought to think about as the begin to explore how to best support all the “free” content out there.
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March 27, 2008 8:31 pm | 
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