A couple weeks ago I stumbled over Blake Schwendimen’s blog post announcing that his novel, The Agency Delta, was done and that he was releasing it into the wild of the Triple-dub.
Self-publishing your stuff is nothing new, especially when you figure there’s a new blog born every .00021557 seconds.
Blake, however, decided he’d skip the part where he charges us all to read it. He’s giving away the book for free to anyone who’ll take it. The trade, however, is that you read it, talk about, pass it along. I’d add “give him a critique” if you have the time. It’s what I plan on doing.
Of course, even giving away your book is nothing new either. Internet marketers have been doing this for quite some time, sending out info products laden with links back to sites aiming to sell you other info products. Even then, to get the freebies you usually have to fork over your e-mail address.
Not the case where Blake’s book is concerned. Just download and read.
There’s two things that stuck in my mind as I read Blake’s announcement:
- He said, “I had a story. Now I want people to read it.” To me, and I know other writers agree, that’s the purest joy there is when we write. Don’t get me wrong, getting paid to do what you were born to do is a nice motivator, too.
- Which leads me to another thing he said: “In fact after weighing the pros and cons of [giving away my novel], I can’t find any actual downside.” I can’t speak for Blake’s goals as a writer, but the first thing that popped into my head was that matter of getting paid for the work.
Granted, he (like me) is yet unpublished, so paying writerly dues is necessary to achieve the prize of getting to write for a living. Truth be told, if I operated under the dogmatic view that I should be paid for every word I offered to person, pixel or paper, I’d be a broke ass writer. Well, I am a broke ass writer, but I should stop typing now if I believed that old maxim.
On the other side of that, though, is the niggling notion that I should be treating my writing as if it were a business, an entrepreneurial endeavor. I don’t know any new businesses that endure when it gives away its products for free for very long. If they do, it’s intended to be short term with some other business decision planned for the future—like the way the video game DOOM came to be so popular.
Where this gets to be a puzzle for writers is determining for how long you release your magnificent words (okay, they’re not always magnificent) into the world for the sake of marketing and potential future notice? It has seemed to work well for people like Seth Godin, who’s released many of his books for practically nothing. In the world of marketing and business thought, Godin is huge.
I suppose like any other business decision, you evaluate how well your plan is working and re-work the plan when necessary. And like any other boot-strapped business, the work is hard. And that’s on top of creating the product.
It’s for this reason I truly admire Konrath. He’s tireless in building his business—himself—an entity he knows as well as anything else in the world.
And that gets, really, to the quick of it in a hurry. If you can’t market yourself, why bother trying to market something else?
Tags: blog, On books, On writers, On writing
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