February 20, 2023
Why I Decided to Offer All my Books for Free
I’ve offered my books for free “always”. All you had to do was email me and ask for a free, no-strings-attached copy. Perhaps you remember one earlier post, on whether art should be free. There I said how I preferred this way over permanently listing my work online for free because I wanted my readers to make the effort and be proactive in showing they want my work.
Quite a few people have done this over the years – and we’ve had some pretty great discussions in the process. However, after deciding to offer all my apps for free some time ago – for reasons you can read about here – I began wondering whether I should do the same with my books.
The answer was obviously, yes – you might have noticed the blog menu has a new entry, “Free Books”. And this post explains the reasons.
Books for Free, more Freedom for Me
The story of my publishing past should be fairly familiar to long-time readers. If not, you can find all the relevant details in my posts on traditional publishing and making up a literary agent. In a nutshell, trying to imitate others, I’ve tried to make money selling books, but I realized things aren’t quite as simple.
Getting a 3-book contract with a publisher wasn’t profitable. In any case – that is, even if I’d made any money, which I didn’t – it wasn’t worth the loss of freedom that I experienced. Thucydides was right: You can be either free or content, but being both is impossible.
Much later, I tried to make money selling books independently. I quickly realized, this is also impossible for similar reasons (on a much smaller scale, of course): Making money (better: having the possibility of making money) involves pleasing an audience. This invariably means loss of freedom.
To cut the long story short, I assure you, a guy with a PhD in English and two decades’ worth of writing (and publishing) experience could find ways to make money selling books, provided he wrote “the right books”, marketed them “the right way”, networked with “the right people”, and of course, again, pleased his audience.
That’s certainly not who I am. I can’t do that, I’m incapable of doing that.
Why Removing the Email Condition?
As you might recall, when I made my programs freely available, there was a transition phase. I gave readers the option to either go to Patreon or email me and ask for access. Eventually, I removed this condition and made them freely accessible directly from the site. Since then, there have been hundreds of users per day. The Fantasy Language Generator has been by far the most popular.
To put it plainly, I am curious to see whether removing the email condition for the novels will have a similar effect. I seriously, seriously doubt it would be of the same caliber, but I’m curious, still. Truth be told, I have mixed feelings about the possible results.
I would of course feel flattered if people suddenly became interested, but I would also feel a bit disappointed: Why do people, if they’re interested enough in something, feel so reluctant to contact the author and ask for a free copy, if he has explicitly told them it’s OK to do so?
How Does It Work?
As simple as it gets (that’s the whole idea): Go to the page listing my novels and, on the list, search for the icon indicating there’s a free download immediately available. Click the “Download” button and you’ll get a .zip file containing the book in .epub, .mobi, and .pdf format.
In any case, you can always email me and ask for a copy, that isn’t going away.
Books for Free Safeguards my Artistic Integrity
Everything I make – blog posts, programs, novels – is meant to be freely available (indeed, not only free but also ad-free). Offering my art (and in this case, my books) for free is the only way to remain intellectually free myself, that’s what I’ve realized.
As I said in my post on writers and freedom:
The quickest, surest way to ideologically enslave someone – and that’s the only true enslavement – is to make them depend on something. Writers are no exception, and they will whore themselves for a few clicks, sales, or likes.
In the context of writing, few things look more pathetic to me than authors trying to promote themselves on Twitter or some similar bastion of inanity and mediocrity.
In the end, I’ll have to go back to Thucydides: We can be free or we can be tranquil. But we must choose, because being both is impossible.