On Jun 3, 2014, at 3:51 AM, Gautam John wrote: > On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 1:57 AM, John Sundman <[email protected]> wrote: > >> This post is superficially about me & my books, but its real subject is >> Creative Commons, remix culture, and writing for money. > > Thanks for these links, John. Makes for very interesting reading. I > used to work with a children's book publishing trust and we began > releasing many of our books under a CC license and over the years, > discovered that the sales of physical books available under a CC > license and available online were higher than those that weren't. A > blog post describing this is here: > http://blog.prathambooks.org/2013/03/pratham-books-is-open-for-publishing.html
Gautam, Thanks for that fascinating article. And thank you, moreover, for the noble effort of your organization to "put a book in every child's hands". I love the analytical approach you took to investigating the impact of Creative Commons on sales of physical books. There's a lot to ponder there. My situation is somewhat different than Prantham Books' in that I no longer have physical books for sale of most of my titles -- either I've sold out, or, in the case of Biodigital, I never produced a physical book in the first place. So it's hard for me to gauge the impact of free ebooks on sales of printed copies. Nevertheless I'm convinced that free ebooks must be part of my overall marketing strategy. There are probably a thousand new self-published novels released every day, and I need to compete against them for reader's attention. I've found over the years that a pretty good percentage of people who've read one of my books will purchase another one. The trick is to get them to read the first one. Making is freely and widely available seems a pretty obvious strategy. Now I'm going to go read some of the other posts that you linked to. Regards, jrs
