The greatest threat to authors today is obscurity. This belief has led many new writers to give away their work for free in hopes of attracting an audience. Even established writers and publishers have gotten in on this scheme, using a sort of bait and hook method by which they give away the first novel of a series in hopes of making sales on the subsequent books or other books by the same author.
I've tried some different schemes myself with my novel, The Hall of the Wood: I've given it away for free from this site, charged for it, put it up for sale in the Amazon Kindle store for prices ranging from $0.99 to $2.99 (currently, it's at $0.99), formatted it into a variety of different formats, sold those formats on Smashwords, and, finally and lastly, I'm going full circle, for The Hall of the Wood will forevermore be given away for free from this site.
In a way, I've been experimenting. I gave it away for free with some success, with about 2,000 total downloads and a lot of favorable comments in return. But with the advent of Amazon's Kindle store, I wanted to see what sort of success I could garner by selling my novel. The tally on that: not much. I've sold a handful of copies each month, but it's so very difficult to get noticed in the Kindle store because of the sheer volume of novels out there (there's that obscurity thing again). It would help to have more content, which I continue to work on, but writing novels takes time, especially when it's not your primary focus. However, that being said, I'll continue to battle against the forces of obscurity by doing what I need to do. Right now, that's giving The Hall of the Wood away for free once and forevermore. I'm done experimenting; it's going to stay free from now on.
If you haven't already, please download The Hall of the Wood (click-through for a description of the novel) and let me know what you think. I give it away in PDF format. You can do what you like with it from there assuming your usage fits into the Creative Commons license under which it is given away. Other formats can be found on Amazon or Smashwords.
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