For his next collection of short stories to be published, titled With a Little Help, author and blogger-extraordinaire Cory Doctorow will be running an experiment so that he can see whether his strategy of offering his work for free is working.
With prices to range from $0.00 to $10,000 for various packages, Doctorow is to track his financial progress and the progress of the experiment as a whole on his new column at Publishers Weekly.
This first column looks at how he will be making money (his marketing and publicity strategy will be covered soon, too):
- E-book: free, in a wide variety of formats
- Audiobook: free, in a wide variety of formats
- Donations: whatever happens
- Print-on-Demand trade paperback: $16 (approximately; price TBD)
- Premium hardcover edition: $250, limited run of 250 copies
- Commission a new story: $10,000 (one only)
- Advertisements: TBD
- Donations of books: TBD
That’s how the money is going to come in. To be honest, I have no idea how much money that will be ($10,000 has already come in, of course). But I do know what I’ll do about it. I’m going to disclose it, all of it, every month, in a running tally in a monthly column here in Publishers Weekly. And incidentally, this article is grossing me all of $900, less my agent’s 15% commission, and the columns $400 hereafter. I will then put this into an appendix, which will be added to new editions of the book and compared to the revenues from Overclocked. That’s as close to an apples-to-apples comparison as I can come up with, but I think it will speak well to the question: what’s the best a writer like me can do on his own, versus with a traditional publisher for whom he does everything he can to aid in book sales?
Comments
3 responses to “Cory Doctorow’s Experiment: Does Free Work?”
It certainly seems like an interesting experiment. If this kind of thing gets you goin, you should also check out Snarkmarket’s Robin Sloan who is running a similar situation with Kickstarter. He set up a page to write a novel by November 1st, with the contingency that he earn $3,500 in donations to pay production costs. There’s a few days left and has raised over $12,000. Which I think is pretty impressive, given that he hardly has the reputation or background of Doctorow (this will be his first novel).
I think we’re definitely seeing a development in the future of publishing here.
I’d be tempted to pay him never to post to boing boing again…. dude is so annoying.
Thanks, Zack, I didn’t hear about Robin Sloan’s experiment.
It’s a great idea, and I’m glad it’s taking off: it allows many others to see that there are many more routes into authorship than the tradition route and the more modern route (blog-to-book).
boing — I admit, I don’t grok Doctorow at all when he starts posting most of the stuff he does. I respect him enormously, though.