A Call For Opinions
Saturday, May 26th, 2007In 1998 I wrote a young-adult novel entitled Skye Object 3270a. It was set in the Deception Well story world, but was otherwise independent of that book and its characters. The novel didn’t find a publisher – no one knew quite what to make of it, I suspect – and it has been sitting ever since, until this spring when I decided I would offer it as an e-book. My first plan was to charge a nominal $5 for the PDF, and I already wrote most of the script to automatically email a copy when a purchase is made… but now I am reconsidering. Is it better to follow instead the model of most open source software, and make the novel available for anonymous download? Certainly it should get much higher circulation that way, and then those who enjoy it can make a small payment if they wish, or return to the website to purchase other books.
So what is the best business model? To make a few dollars upfront? Or to try to get my name out to a wider audience? At the moment, I am definitely leaning toward Plan B. If anyone has thoughts on this, I’d be interested to hear them.
Thanks!