It’s a perverted value system.
The Internet is all about FREE STUFF!
Free porn, free music, free movies, and sadly for me as a writer, free bloody ebooks. What a perverted value system we have today.
Well, pardon my screaming in caps, but ever since the Internet came into our daily lives, that is what it has really been about to so many. Yet, even now, after thirty years, one would think we would have matured and learnt to understand the benefits of being able to happily and conveniently shop online, and avoid queues and cashiers.
Unfortunately not it would seem, as FREE is still king, which a perverted value system that makes no sense.
But, there is a HUGE Internet economy that has thrived from almost day one way back in the mid-80s. Online advertising. In my mind, it’s an evil, but as I have discovered to my chagrin, and with an admission here that I have profited from it on my blogs, it is something that the ‘I want everything for bloody free‘ crowd seem to have missed in their anarchic attitude and odd belief that people, other than themselves, of course, should invest a lot of money and time in websites, products, services, supply chains, delivery mechanisms and software to allow instant downloading, or in my case, write books, so they can get all the stuff for FREE.
While they hunt for anything they can get for free, they click away quite merrily, totally oblivious to the fact that they are contributing to the antithesis of their belief. Freebie hunters are happy clickers, and happy clickers are more often than not, predominant among those who continually drip feed money to Internet advertising companies. A vicious little non-productive circle, which makes billions for Google, Facebook and many others, from those who are devout thrifty freebie hunters.
What a perverted value system. The Internet is FREE!!!
Yeah, like hell it is.
But then there is a very odd relationship between FREE and BUY that does my brain in, and for the life of me, I have never been able to figure this out. It is that giving away FREE ebooks leads to sales. Go figure. But here is the proof in my own sales and free ebook statistics on Amazon.
Take careful notice of the last few days in both graphs, when I offered no free ebooks. Yep, no sales. Ok, it’s not irrefutable rocket science data, but I have seen this occur so many times now that I am now convinced that no free ebooks, leads to few or no sales. Sure, free ebooks on Amazon Kindle increase a book’s ranking a little, but surely there must be a better way to make a sale, other than have to give away hundreds of FREE ebooks.
What a strange world we live in.
Um, can we go back to pre-1985, when the world was, well, almost sane?
Unfortunately its the price we all pay for participation Derek. :(
You are in competition to millions of writers, a large part of them are probably just as good as you are. Being published is no longer a privilege of the few.
Be grateful , that you have readers and that some of them are ready to pay you.
I’ve always assumed that free giveaways gave readers the incentive to wait for the next freebie. But now that I analyze my sales, I see there is some truth in what you say. Crazy indeed !!