I'm so over FREE - by Debbie Bennett

I’ve written much over the years about the pros and cons of offering ebooks for free. I once swore I’d never do it, that I’d sweated blood and wasn’t about to give my efforts away for nothing, that writers should always be paid for their work.

And then sales dried up. With a six-book series, FREE seemed the way to generate interest and offer readers a way to see if they liked my books. Try before you buy, in effect. And for a while it worked. For well over a year, I was selling more books by giving one away than I was when they were all at a fixed price.

And then sales dried up. To be fair, the past year or so seems to have been hard for a lot of us. Blame the referendum, Brexit, Trump – whatever excuses you can come up with – but sales aren’t what they were eighteen months ago. At all. The traditional authors are squeezed in different ways, and I can’t pretend to understand how it all works in the rarefied strata of the big 6/5/4/whatever, but the indie pecking-order is somewhat different. Somewhere online, there’s a saying that less than 10% of “authors” sell more than 100 books – or it might be copies of a single book: for a huge number of authors, that amounts to the same thing. And at the top of the indie pile, there are authors who are making five and even six-figure sums from ebook sales. Not the Hugh Howeys of the world, but less well-known indie writers, quietly writing and selling, writing and selling. The key, I think is probably in the writing …

They talk over on the venerated kboards of writing and releasing a novel a month. A month. I don’t think that would be sustainable for me even without the day job. I’d burn out rapidly, even supposing I could manage a few months of such pressure. Yet that seems to be the best route to sales, to being good at this writing job. And if that’s what it takes to be in the race, I’m afraid I’m out before the start of the sprint. To me it’s more of a marathon anyway. Yet I suspect these are your big-sellers at the top of the indie list, the writers who are making a comfortable living at this game.

So – reasons to be cheerful? Or optimistic, at least … Well I’ve sold a lot more than 100 books, for starters. Hell, I’ve sold more than 100 paperbacks – which given that I have no shop-front or store to sell from, isn’t actually bad going, is it? Add on ebooks and I’m by no means anywhere near the bottom of the list. And my books are regularly borrowed from the local library (I check these things…) No, I’m not making anything like a living out of this – but it’s what I do. I could no more stop being a writer than stop being a reader. And while I haven’t put anything new out for a while, I’m still in the game and not planning on quitting any time soon.

But free? Nah, I’m not doing that any more. I put Hamelin’s Child back to paid a few weeks ago on Apple and Barnes & Noble. It took Amazon a week or so to catch up, but it will now cost a whole 99p to buy, including VAT. Bizarrely there are still a few copies going as free on Amazon – I can’t quite figure out why – but surprisingly sales are up. Maybe the old adage that you get what you pay for actually is true?

Some posts about the state of book publishing and selling:

https://www.bkconnection.com/the-10-awful-truths-about-book-publishing?redirected=true

https://electricliterature.com/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-book-sales-but-were-afraid-to-ask-1fe6bc00aa2d 

http://www.writersdigest.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=266192