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Why I Decided to Offer All my Books for Free

February 20, 2023

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
I want to reiterate something I wrote in my “No Ads, no Corporate Masters” post: I’m not perfect, but whatever I make is mine.
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5 Most Popular 2022 Posts – and 2 that Are Sad

December 26, 2022

2022 is almost over. The truth is, I don’t really see anything special about the end of the year (or the beginning of a new one). It’s just an arbitrary limit marking another revolution around the sun. But I’m fully ready to opportunistically take advantage of it and offer a list of the 5 most popular 2022 posts on Home for Fiction.

At the same time, I’d like to share with you 2 posts that haven’t received the attention I believe they deserve. Let’s rectify this in 2023!

popular 2022 posts
Whenever I don’t want to spend time finding a more relevant photo, you get a cat
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No Ads, no Corporate Masters

September 5, 2022

The phrase of the title, “No Ads, no Corporate Masters”, is of course a wordplay on “No Gods, no Masters”. It’s also a phrase I use on Home for Fiction, for example whenever you try to access any of the apps (we’ll talk about this more in a moment) .

It’s a way for me to remind you that Home for Fiction displays no ads, and it’s controlled by nobody.

But why all this? Why do I refuse to put ads on Home for Fiction? The short answer is, for the same reason I’ve refused corporate masters (and as you’ll discover in this post, I’ve had many such… suitors): Because I can’t compromise on what Home for Fiction is – in terms of content as well as aesthetics.

The longer answer is something I decided to write this post about.

Note: Years have passed, and certain things have changed regarding Home for Fiction. I’ve tried really hard to make things my way, moving in an increasingly more artistic and less materialistic direction. For instance, I tried various ways of keeping the Home for Fiction apps free, but people abused the offers. I am officially defeated. My idea of keeping them free turned out to be naive, and I simply can’t afford to pay for the server resources required. I only wanted to make apps I liked, that’s it.

Everything below this point should be seen as a snapshot of history and might not reflect current reality.

no ads no corporate masters
“No ads, no corporate masters” can be both lonely and liberating. There are no shortcuts – you can be either free or content; being both is impossible
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