Since I started offering Wild Child and Lust,
Money & Murder (Book 1) as free downloads, I frequently receive questions
from people asking me why I'm doing it. "Don't you lose
money?" "Doesn't it bother you to give whole books away
free?" I thought I would take out a moment to explain why.
First, all of us love to get free stuff. I know I do!
The offer of a free product has universal appeal. A more common method writers use to promote
their books is to offer sample chapters. But somehow, offering free sample
chapters doesn't sound nearly as enticing as offering entire books for free.
To me, "sample chapters" conjures up images of a ragged sheaf of
papers held together with a paper clip, not a nice, neat finished polished
product wrapped in a pretty package.
But there's a second and more important reason
I give books away free. If you are a reader who does not yet know me,
asking you to fork over your hard-earned money on the blind faith that I will
provide you with an awesome reading experience...well, that’s asking too
much. Your time is just as valuable as mine, and that’s what I’m asking
you to invest—your time. I’m taking the
gamble that if you like my free book, you will reach into your pocketbook (or,
more realistically, "click" on a Buy This Book button on Amazon or
your preferred online retailer) and purchase one of my other novels.
In reality, the amount of time that I ask you
to invest is relatively small. My
philosophy is simple: if you’re not
immediately drawn into my story and reading forward because you want
to, then put the book aside and
read something else. There’s no reason
to push yourself through a novel, not in today’s world, where there are
so many
other pleasurable distractions available.
Reading fiction should be a fun, entertaining experience. The last
thing it should be is work! Work, and the pressures of our daily lives,
are precisely what most of us are trying to escape from when we sit down
to
read a good novel.
So, in summary, what I ask new readers to do is
invest a little of their time—usually not more than five minutes—to download
and start reading one of my free books.
In return, they (hopefully) discover a new author who can give them
many, many hours of reading pleasure.
