Authors Electric

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 so...