Free is good for whales, for love, for grocery store samples, but writers?

I’m not entirely convinced. I ask the questions because Kindle offers you the option to have your book for free for a few days if you enroll in one of their services. Notice how vague I am on the details. Can you tell I’m not that interested?

Which I suppose is a bit hypcritical of me since I download free books all the time. And they do serve one great purpose – to introduce me to writers that I might not have tried otherwise, risk free. That’s the only real benefit I can see, to get people to try you out. Then if they like you, they’ll come back and spend a few sheckles, which I often do.

So, I guess I answered my own question. Free is good for writers, in certain circumstances. It’s like a debate I took part in on Facebook recently. The lady was asking, at least I think she was asking, about ebook pricing. There was something in there about attracting young audiences, quality, indie vs. established, yack, yack, yack.

My contribution? Price yourself according to the market – meaning if you’re an indie author it might not be smart to price yourself in the same bracket as E L James. Focus on quality, and do your thing with marketing. It’s not rocket science. I was actually scratching my head over the purpose of the post.

Currently, both of the books I have out are $1.99, as will be my third release The Hick and The Hippie, which comes out next week. Do I think I’m worth more, of course. Could I have charged more, sure. $2.99 would have been entirely reasonable.

But I have to think about the length of the books and the fact that while in my own mind I’m a star, to everyone else, it’s like, huh? When that changes you better believe fat kids gonna boost her fees accordingly. So I guess that means you should scoop up Fiona Love and A Willing Slave while they’re still a bargain. You can say you were one of my early fans and that you got my first books for a song * slips away in fantasy involving huge Borders-like book store with self sitting at a desk wearing a fedora cocked over one eye and a huge smile while signing books for a huge line of equally smiley people. *

Still, people who find out I’m a writer and immediately want me to do lengthy projects for them, gratis, forget it. This indie ain’t free!