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 – and even more flattered if they were inspired enough to support my work (preferably not financially) – 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 – plus a short message from me in .txt format.
I’ll be changing availability from time to time, depending on the novels’ participating in Amazon’s KDP Select program (which requires exclusive rights). Still, the idea is that, at any given time, most of my books should be available for immediate free download.
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.
4 Comments
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I would have bought some of yours – if I had the capacity to examine them, read the samples, etc. And then read the books. I think novels teach you interesting things about their authors.
Since I can either write or read (only two neurons work, and I need one for breathing), I haven’t had the pleasure. The writing has become way too important to me for my own good.
But I’m looking forward to hearing how your experiment works out. And, since research on long covid might help people like me get some of their life back, maybe I will get to read some time in the future.
Many thanks – for the comment as well as the tentative promise. Health is one of those things that we take for granted, and only when we no longer have we realize its importance.
I am curious whether your experiment will turn out as expected or not. A fantasy language generator is a tool, so it obviously will be accessed, especially in the age of easy fiction and broadband internet access to everything. Everyone wants to be a writer — evidence of the æsthetic crisis we live in —, but no one wants to read beyond their “familiarity zone” (let’s call it that, instead of “comfort zone”, for anti-capitalist reasons). Instead of learning linguistics thoroughly, learning foreign tongues, and then building a language from the ground up, they’d much rather use a tool that’s readily available. Not that there are any problems with using tools in itself, but to use a tool to its full potential demands we know what the tool does, or what it is supposed to do, and that we tweak it to our needs if possible. Most won’t go through all the effort for that, especially regarding conlanging (which you know I do to good capacity). This saddens me. But what most wouldn’t realize is that novels can be tools too! Not in the same manner, but they can. Be it for broad and vague inspiration or stealing ideas (focused, explicit inspiration?), a novel can be a tool for learning how to write or how not to write, for developing ideas, for figuring out how another author faced the same challenges, for getting out of one’s familiarity zone, thus expanding one’s taste and soul, and some other things. I hope people realize this.
You are right in both points, about fantasy languages and novels as tools.
When I was a young and stupid author, I thought writing books and reading them were two entirely separate processes. Some writers (and virtually all serious ones) eventually realize the importance of reading, but a majority likely never do. More damningly, I’ve encountered a disturbing number of people (and that includes writers) who don’t know how to read literarily – that is, they read and can comprehend what the words and sentences and paragraphs say, they can grasp the story, the plot, but they have great difficulties in connecting what they read to an abstract, external reality.
Perhaps you remember the story, but I’ll repeat it: At the banquet of my doctoral defense, a then-colleague asked me about my plans. I said I would at least continue writing fiction. And he said something that made quite an impression on me: “The problem with writing fiction is that nowadays there are more writers than readers”. He likely meant it from a marketing perspective, but I’ve gradually also seen literary dimensions, such as the one I explained above.