Freemium

Writing in the modern world is vastly different than it was only a few years ago. Becoming a writer used to mean sending manuscript after manuscript to agents and publishers and running to the mailbox each day to count the rejection letters. Nowadays, any idiot with a laptop can self publish anything from a collection of lame love poems sent to their high school sweethearts to a how-to guide for taking care of people with cancer (ahem). Once you finish your masterpiece, you upload it to a website, click here and there, and now millions of users with Kindles and Nooks and iPads can completely ignore it. You don't even get the rejection letters anymore!

So, yes, I'm a published author, or more accurately, a self-published author. And I'm thrilled every month when I get a couple of direct deposits that usually total $10 to $20, representing my cut from the sales of electronic and paper editions of my book. I've probably sold around 100 copies in the year or so since I published Welcome to the Club! Surviving Cancer, One Laugh at a Time. I've given away a few dozen more copies to fellow Members of the Club, family, my doctors and nurses, etc. That always feels good. But the CPA in me can't help but notice, this is no way to make a living.

In the technology sector, when you have a good idea that you just want people to be aware of, you often turn to a freemium model. Give away a basic version of your software, your iPhone app, etc. that has decent functionality, then, like any good crack dealer, get a few of those users hooked so they're willing to start paying for the full version. Want to read PDF's on any device?  Download the free Adobe Reader. Want to create PDF's? Insert your credit card here please.

As an author, I've thought about how the freemium model would apply to me. Amazon lets me allow people to download a chapter of the book for free on the hopes that people would then want to pay for the rest of the book. I've had exactly 2 people download the sample chapter, and I think one of those two was me testing out the feature. Then I noticed they also give me the option to make the whole book free for up to 5 days each calendar quarter. So I tried it out last Friday.

The results blew me away. Based on two Tweets and a couple of Facebook posts during the day, with a couple of Re-Tweets and shares by some of you, people downloaded 213 copies of my book for free. In one day, I gave away twice as many copies as I'd sold in a year. Since then, I've sold two copies, so it's not as though those 200+ readers became my evangelists.

The question to me is what to do with this data. How, if at all, does the freemium model apply to self-published books? It's easy to do this with eBooks, but what about the printed book, which had accounted for about 3/4 of my total book sales? I'd love to get your thoughts, dear readers.

And if you missed out on the free day, don't worry. We'll do it again soon