More In the Debate On Free Giveaways

Back on February 19, I blogged about Tor's free email giveaways here. If you sign up for the publisher's newsletter, you get a free email every week.

On Wednesday, blogger Simon Owens of the Bloggasm blog reported on the success of some of Tor's authors here.

Owens says:

Authors who go this route believe that the ebooks act as a form of advertising, arguing that the negative effects on sales from people reading it for free are offset by the word-of-mouth campaigns those same people will initiate. These creative commons evangelists also tend to point out that most readers don’t like long texts on a screen, a fact that may cause them to buy the print copy once they’ve sampled enough of the story online.

Sci-fi novelist John Scalzi agreed to add his book Old Man's War to the Tor giveaway list. Owens reports:

In his case, Scalzi watched sales of his book shoot up by 20 percent. But what’s even more interesting is that the sequel to Old Man’s War saw an increase of over 30 percent. Both he and [Tobias] Buckell benefited more from sales of books later in their series.

Thanks to Jonathan Lyons' blog here for the story.