
I gave away my books and sales increased - geerlingguy
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-gave-away-my-books-free-and-sales-increased-4x
======
paultopia
There are a number of claims that this happens in the academic market as well.

Sources:

1\. Peter Suber's Open Access monograph, chapter 5, p. 107-110 (itself open
access, of course).
[https://cyber.harvard.edu/hoap/Open_Access_(the_book)](https://cyber.harvard.edu/hoap/Open_Access_\(the_book\))
argues that OA books facilitate "searching and sampling," and then people want
to read the whole thing in the nicer print format.

2\. University of Michigan Press says it happens sometimes thanks to increased
"awareness and visibility":
[https://www.press.umich.edu/openaccess](https://www.press.umich.edu/openaccess)

3\. A phd thesis reviewing studies, and finding a negative relationship
between OA and sales:
[https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/68465](https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/68465)

4\. A swiss study of matched pairs of books, one OA, one traditional; no
statistically significant difference in sales
[http://www.snf.ch/SiteCollectionDocuments/OAPEN-
CH_schlussbe...](http://www.snf.ch/SiteCollectionDocuments/OAPEN-
CH_schlussbericht_en.pdf)

~~~
outlace
Hypothesis: Books that already have high exposure and demand will likely be
negatively impacted by making a free version available. Books that would have
good sales if more people knew about them will likely benefit from the
increased exposure from making free versions available.

But yeah I personally have had the experience of the first link - I've
purchased many physical books that have free (and legal) PDFs online because I
like print books better.

------
IAmGraydon
It’s difficult to truly measure the outcome of this sort of promotion in
completely new market conditions such as those we’re currently experiencing. I
run a retail business on the side (still work full time) and sales have more
than doubled during the pandemic with no other changes to incentivize it. I’ve
been selling the same product for 1.5 years, so I have a good idea of what an
average month looks like.

Could be that people are spending more time online and therefore shopping.
Could be that people are spending more time with their hobbies (it’s a product
for musicians). Could be people spending their stimulus checks. Could be a
number of other factors.

My point is that’s it’s probably unwise to draw conclusions from data which
was gathered in an unprecedented market, and its best to wait for market
stability before running promotional trials.

~~~
tren
I agree with this, I work for an ebook company and our sales are 2-3x what
they usually are for this time of year.

Even so, well done experimenting with a different model Jeff, you'll have a
larger (and more appreciative) fan base because of it.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
> you'll have a larger (and more appreciative) fan base because of it.

That's an important point. Writers don't just want sales, they want readers.

------
mobilio
Nothing new...

[https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2008/02/03/pirate-
coelho/](https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2008/02/03/pirate-coelho/)
[https://torrentfreak.com/alchemist-author-pirates-own-
books-...](https://torrentfreak.com/alchemist-author-pirates-own-
books-080124/)

In short Coelho pirate his own books for free. Sales was 0 in the beginning,
then 10k, next year 100k, next year 1m.

~~~
gameofcode
Slightly off topic, but it took me a few attempts to really get into The
Alchemist - maybe because I didn't appreciate where it was going or it just
wasn't good reading material for where I was in life.

Eventually I stuck with it and found it a really eye-opening read, I feel like
it's a life guidance book in disguise and I'm usually averse to them but the
concept of a Personal Legend really did resonate with me.

Not really surprised by all the negative reviews on Goodreads, I stubbornly
felt a similar way for a while.

~~~
bananamerica
Brazilian speaking. Coelho is considered one of our finest songwriters of all
time. He sells a lot, but is considered low literature over here. The
Alchemist is basically a bunch of mystical and self help cliches.

Paulo Coelho likes to propagate the notion that he posses actual magical
powers. When a news crew went to his house, he refused to unsheathe a sword
because it might unleash catastrophic events.

That said, I read The Alchemist when I was a teenager and found it pretty fun.
As a adult, I would never would never take him seriously.

~~~
lowdose
You have to appreciate the imagination of the guy!

~~~
bananamerica
Well, that’s the thing: he’s not that original. He does know how to write
enjoyable best sellers with mystic overtones.

------
axegon_
I think this has more to do with your target audience. The books in question
are aimed at an audience which overall has a really good purchasing power.

To many people 15 euros is an expensive book but looking at my tech books
shelf, and seeing an average price of around 50 euros(many of which I would
have paid double without a single doubt of hesitation), you quickly see a huge
gap between the different audiences.

Good developers and tech people certainly appreciate the complexity of tech
books and are well aware that they are often guides to prototypes, as opposed
to full, production solutions. Hence the reason why many are more than happy
to support open source projects from our own pockets. Take "The Rust
Programming Language" book for instance - it's completely free online but I
was more than happy to purchase the paper version in order to support the
authors, the same way I donate to the Linux foundation, the PSF foundation and
so on. And sure enough, I appreciate someone's hard work here and I'd happily
buy their books should I see them useful to me.

I can't recall which artist it was (I recall it being Jan Garbarek but don't
quote me on this) who gave away an album online where you could get it for
free or any amount you like. I recall several sales in the 5-digits which is a
clear message. But much like textbooks, such music has a very particular
audience and such... Let's call them "stunts" wouldn't be successful for most
products and would backfire terribly.

------
asicsp
That's crazy sales numbers. Congrats. And I noticed an issue with leanpub
sales notifications as well, was pleasantly surprised to see I'd earned more
than what my emails were indicating. Seems to have been fixed, no discrepancy
in last two weeks.

For all my books, I've made it free for a few days and promoted it on
HN/reddit/twitter/etc. That period gives me the most sales (as both leanpub
and gumroad allow people to pay more than the price of the book).

Before my latest book, due to increasing fear of the pandemic, I made all my
books free for the foreseeable future and released the markdown source as
well. Then, released the new book early (cutting down exercises and few more
things). My post on HN [1] reached front page, in which I also mentioned about
my other books. Last month saw the biggest sale ever for me, covers about four
months of my living costs. After about two week break, I decided to update all
my books (will take about two months). And then back to writing another book.

I also got an offer for one of my books from a publishing company, which I
turned down. A few users wrote me a mail, felt nice to discuss and goes a long
way in motivating me to continue writing and improving my content. A big
thanks to all the readers :)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22758217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22758217)

~~~
geerlingguy
For any author, I think the biggest joy we have is when a reader writes us and
gives us some encouragement or helpful ideas/corrections/suggestions.

Sometimes, yes, it can be a little burdensome if someone dumps 20 different
subjective grammar fixes, but even then, it shows someone cares enough about
something I produced that they spent the time to give me some feedback about
it.

Half the reason I keep updating Ansible for DevOps is because readers keep
pushing new ideas or helping fix technical debt incurred by the passage of
time in the book's GitHub repo!

------
Thorentis
I guess this is another nail in the coffin for the "economic argument" in
favour of monopolistic copyright law. People will continue making good content
even if it is freely available, and sales may even increase rather than
decrease.

~~~
macintux
I don’t follow your logic.

Without copyright, someone else could take the author’s books and give them
away or sell them without attribution. How would he benefit from that?

~~~
Thorentis
I am not opposed to copyright law that makes it illegal to _sell_ somebody
else's work for profit. But what's the difference between me giving you a copy
of the book for free (with attribution) and the author giving you a copy of
the book?

I am opposed to copyright that stops people from copying works they have
purchased (or obtained elsewhere) and distributing them. And my argument was
that, as shown by the post, giving copies away for free can actually
_increase_ overall sales rather than decrease them.

~~~
macintux
This is weak evidence for that conclusion. LeanPub makes it possible to buy a
free book, so everyone who came for the free copy had an opportunity to
immediately “tip” the author.

~~~
Thorentis
I'm not saying one anecdote along is sufficient evidence. But I've seen a fair
few cases where content creators who previously had little audience or
readership suddenly gained one by giving away their content for free.

In the digital age, it is so easy to copy books, films, TV shows. The
arguments against making it legal, is that film studios will make less money.
But what percentage of people are currently _not_ pirating content because
it's illegal? I'd say a very very small handful.

I would much rather have the option to obtain a copy for free, and donate to
the author if I thought it was worth it. Patreon works exactly like this.

------
mpalmer
Nice write-up but I'm really commenting in appreciation of the perfect iambic
pentameter in the HN title.

~~~
sethammons
wow, how did you notice that?

~~~
mpalmer
Not sure really, it just had that 'bounce'!

------
Melting_Harps
> I guess this is another nail in the coffin for the "economic argument" in
> favour of monopolistic copyright law. People will continue making good
> content even if it is freely available, and sales may even increase rather
> than decrease.

This reminds me of a semi-relevant experiment that happened in the underground
UK bass music community; most labels are privately owned and self-releasing
albums are the norm.

So, somewhere in 2009ish Vinyl was coming back within the consumer Market, it
was always strong within the DJ and producer community as dubplates were a
form of currency to show exclusiveness and clout to get people to come out to
the raves to hear a certain 'sound.'

But, it occurred to the label owners and producers that they were losing a lot
of money to the downloads, so instead they started to offer free digital DLs
with the purchase of any vinyl pressing from these labels/producers. This was
a direct response to customers voicing their opinions on forums and radio show
chats/comments that made an effective feedback system possible.

I used to have to wait 2-5 weeks for a vinyl to arrive, and the USD-GBP
exchange rate was horrible, so I often resorted just getting the digital
version, but after having lost my collections due to failed HDDs twice I knew
I had to change.

And once they offered this option the community responded and an influx of
vinyl purchases started to come in from everywhere creating 2-3rd pressings
just to fulfill demand Soon after that low-cost vinyl players were starting to
gain traction and it really took off, as it was seen as somewhat of a status
symbol.

Now, every bandcamp artist worth it's salt has limited pressings with
exclusive deals that offer this as the model proved successful--many of the
artists I follow are often sold out within a week.

The Freemium model can be pretty effective, I used it in my startup to some
success: but 60x is beyond anyone's expectations, congrats!

Sidenote: the aforementioned music community had its humble beginnings as a
Pirate Radio station and being a platform to highlight local talent in an
emerging scene. Years later Red Bull Music Academy would come around and
invest tons of money in PR and events for those same artists.

~~~
Thorentis
Great anecdote, thanks for sharing that. The more I hear these stories, the
more I'm convinced that copyright law does not protect content producers at
all. It protects the interests of very, very big distributors (record labels,
movie producers) while in some cases making it _more_ difficult for indie
producers to distribute (licensing, derivative works, distribution, it's all a
nightmare).

------
bovermyer
I'm not surprised. These books, and Jeff Geerling's contributions to Ansible
in general, are a very strong resource for new Ansible users.

------
petercooper
"For a typical author, obscurity is a far greater threat than piracy." \- Tim
O'Reilly

~~~
yesenadam
"Human life is so far a game of cross-purposes. If we wish a thing to be kept
secret, it is sure to transpire: if we wish it to be known, not a syllable is
breathed about it." – Hazlitt

------
bArray
I think there are a few reasons this works well (a simplification):

1\. Ideally, you want everybody who wants to consume your product to do so at
the highest price they are willing to pay (as long as that is above the cost
of production and some minimum profit margin). People willing to spend a lot
of money are willing to also spend less, but people who are only willing to
spend less money are not willing to spend more. Therefore you target the high-
buyers first and the low-buyers second, until you reach zero.

2\. Value loss over time means that there is some non-infinite window in which
to sell your product in order to maximize profits. The trade-off is likely
market (people wanting to purchase), selling price and exposure (how many
people even know it exists) - x axis is time and y is profit.

In relation to this story, the exposure was low and the market was lower as a
result. Reducing price increased exposure and therefore allowed the visibility
of the product to the market out there. Don't under value word-of-mouth!

I think this is why the film and music industry need to calm down about
piracy. The EU for example withheld a study because it showed that piracy
didn't provably harm sales [1]. How many people have had their internet shut
off, been fined or worse because of piracy - when there's no proven victim. In
fact, if anecdotes like this story are anything to go by - it may even improve
sales.

My anecdote: After pirating the Matrix trilogy (in a time where I had no
money), I ended up buying the films on DVD twice (each film individually and
then the box set). I never would have purchased these films had I first not
pirated them. Similarly, I found a PDF for a book on scrum before purchasing
it - and then recommending my team do the same.

Side note: I remember interviewing for a company that did this kind of
analysis and automatically adjusted prices for online websites. I don't think
those guys actually had any clue (it was all very young programmers and no
mathematicians/machine learning people) - but in theory it's entirely
possible.

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-
piracy...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy-
doesnt-hurt-game-sales-may-actually-help/)

~~~
rconti
This an interesting addition to my line of thought which was, basically,
"giving them away free is good PR" which, of course, drives attention and
sales.

If _every_ book publisher (say, in the tech industry) announced free books at
the same time, would this person's sales have increased by the same amount?
Almost certainly not. Would they have increased at all? .. probably?

But your comment adds a new twist, which is the timing/price discrimination
side, where, to run an experiment, we'd also have to control for works that
were already out vs not, by running this experiment on new releases as well as
works already available for sale for some amount of time.

~~~
perl4ever
Tech books are not all in competition with each other, seems to me. Free or
not, something has to be of interest to me and good enough to cover
opportunity costs.

------
gnicholas
Lots of edtech companies gave away their tools for free [1] to support
distance learning during school shutdowns. I'm sure most of them hope to
garner additional sales in the long run, and possibly the short run also.

My edtech startup has been giving away our most popular tool for a couple
months, and paid sales are probably up 30% during that time. It certainly
wasn't why we did it (we've had philanthropic programs from the beginning
[1]), but it doesn't hurt.

1:
[https://www.amazingeducationalresources.com/](https://www.amazingeducationalresources.com/)

2: [https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/why-every-edtech-
company-s...](https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/why-every-edtech-company-
should-have-a-buy-1-give-1-program-97285608097b)

------
bg24
You do a good service to the society, Jeff.

One hypothesis can be that many people (like me) ended up paying for both the
books (ansible and kubernetes) even if it was free. Someone puts their soul
into creating good books that we benefit from, so why not pay if we can.

------
Arkanosis
> Nobody who bought my book will buy it again

This might be mostly true, however when you've got something for free (because
of a giveaway or through piracy) and you love it, you may want to buy it
afterwards to show you support and maximize the chances of having more stuff
you like in the future.

I actually quite often pay for stuff I already have and my level of
satisfaction is on average much higher than when I pay for stuff I don't have
(should I say obviously?).

------
dba7dba
I really appreciate Jeff's "Ansible for DevOps".

It's what got me going in using Ansible. I didn't even finish the book (due to
lack of time) or know all the features in the book but I appreciate knowing
Ansible whenever I use it.

And his book is the reason I started writing my own ebook. It will never be as
good as his but it's been a great experience.

~~~
geerlingguy
According to Amazon reviewers, your book would be much better than mine if you
just add an index :)

------
thevagrant
I stumbled across Jeff's post about giving away his books in March. The books
looked particularly useful. I felt I would get value from them so I opted to
pay. It's great to see others did also!

What also influenced my decision was that another of Jeff's projects had been
quite helpful to me (DrupalVM).

------
Der_Einzige
Thank you for this anecdote. I made a post awhile ago about how it's almost
never small-time authors who get screwed by piracy and was promptly downvoted

Yet again, we find that benefits of exposure > costs of some free-loading

~~~
geerlingguy
To add to that point: I have a few google searches set up to get links to my
books from warez/free download/random blog sites, and I see, on average, 3-5
new sites per day that have full PDF copies of my books.

In the beginning I worried about this, but in the end, there are two reasons
why I stopped caring:

1\. I keep the book updated and relevant, so those versions of the book are
basically historic artifacts and become more and more worthless over time.
This value helps people who actually care about the knowledge in the book to
decide to buy from LeanPub or Amazon, eventually.

2\. Most of the people who put up with getting popup ads and malware on their
computers just to download my book aren't likely to pay for it anyways.

I have only filed one or two takedown notices, to people who posted YouTube
videos infringing on the content of some of my talks and past videos, and once
to a more popular / non-malicious site that was sharing a PDF.

~~~
mehrdadn
I just read the 2016 bit about how you published individual chapters to gauge
interest; that was pretty cool. Could I ask you a couple of questions about
it?

1\. How does "purchasing" a few chapters look on the user side? e.g. Do you
price every chapter and they only pay for the difference if they want to
purchase the full book later? Do updates (which you said they're entitled to?)
come out for individual chapters?

2\. How do you get the word out initially? (I see you mentioned going to
conferences; it'd be nice if you could elaborate or mention if there are other
potentially effective approaches.)

Thanks, and congrats on your success so far!

~~~
geerlingguy
In my case, using LeanPub, the way it works is as follows:

1\. I choose a point in time to start 'publishing' (in my case with A4D it was
after 3 chapters were written, first draft). 2\. Users can start buying at
this point, at a minimum price I determine (starting at 'free', or 4.99 and
up). 3\. Any user who buys the book gets DRM-free downloads in any format from
LeanPub, and the book is on their permanent shelf on LeanPub, so they can
download any newer version forever, free.

As an author, when I push a new update, I have the ability to also send a
notification email to all subscribed readers so they know a new version is
available—otherwise I can just silently update it (e.g. for smaller bugfixes
in the text or slight corrections).

~~~
kungfufrog
Hi Jeff, love your work and have followed for a long time. I just noticed on
Leanpub the minimum price for Ansible for DevOps is $9.99 despite following a
link from your blog post that stated the $0 cost was being extended through
April. Is it still intended to be $0?

See here: [https://imgur.com/a/UxSyr28](https://imgur.com/a/UxSyr28)

~~~
geerlingguy
It is now May, in most parts of the universe ;-)

~~~
kungfufrog
Ahh, thank you! I legitimately forgot what month it was!

~~~
geerlingguy
Some days it feels like it's still March...

------
mcprwklzpq
It seem like an illustration of the power of reciprocity in social
psychology.[1] You give something away for free and then those who took what
you gave feel obligated to give something back to you.

I sometimes wonder if those who give away their book for an email would get
more emails if they would first give away their book and only then ask your
email.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_(social_psychology...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_\(social_psychology\)#The_power_of_reciprocity)

~~~
geerlingguy
I hate it when people ask for an email for something free; feels the same as
those annoying pop ups when reading half of the world’s blogs these days. If I
want to follow someone I’ll find an RSS feed :P

------
jlgaddis
Out of curiosity, has (the print version of) _Ansible for DevOps_ been updated
since it was first published?

I purchased the dead-tree version probably three or four years ago and,
unfortunately, it was basically already outdated by that time. I learned a bit
from it but so Ansible moves pretty fast -- or did back then, at least -- so
it wasn't nearly as useful as it could have been. (I don't remember any
specifics, sorry.)

That experience led me to stop buying books on new and/or fast-moving
technologies.

------
ChuckMcM
This is great, and it was interesting that Jeff could do the experiment.

I know two book agents and both agree that the #1 killer of new author sales
is the fact that nobody else has read one of their books. There was an
excellent article from book agents that found the "piracy" rate of new books
foreshadowed their sales success.

It is one of the more interesting things about information economics that
information can become valuable as a _reward_ for production.

------
enriquto
I buy a lot of physical books because I love them, an I can relate to this.
Whenever I see a book in my field that the author is offering for download, I
systematically buy it. When still wanting a book that is not freely
downloadable by the author, I first look at a pirate copy and read it for a
few days before buying. Would never consider buying a book before having seen
an electronic copy.

------
quickthrower2
This is pretty much the freemium model. Free gives you free marketing as
people will be talking about it. Sharing on social etc. The pricing page is
effectively:

    
    
        Free: Book
    
        Premium: Book + nice feeling of helping out a nice guy
    

And sounds like a lot of people thought the premium version was worth it.
Great stuff.

------
thyrsus
What's the best way to get a paper copy? I see Amazon for the DevOps book; are
they the easiest to deal with? Most reliable? Highest margin?

------
acd
Great work Jeff! I think it works like marketing when you give away the books.
More people who are willing to pay knows about the books through the free
copies.

------
BizadmarkNY
Those are crazy numbers and bravo to you. I am trying to use ebook as lead
magnet for Sales Funnel and your insights are very helpful.

------
m52go
It can make sense. It's also better for longevity of the work.

I'm surprised Jeff is offering his videos for free too though...that seems
like a perfect candidate for a paywall to capture some of the value created
from the books he's giving away. Of course I don't know the whole story and
realize it's a personal choice -- but, in any case, this is exactly why giving
a book away for free can be so powerful.

I'm planning to launch a book marketplace that offers books for free if
downloaded via P2P while charging a small fee for direct HTTP downloads.

[https://100millionbooks.org/librery/](https://100millionbooks.org/librery/)

~~~
geerlingguy
> I'm surprised Jeff is offering his videos for free too though

I figured it would also offer people a distraction / way to learn something
during the workday (or night, I guess, outside of US and most of Europe). I've
considered doing a full-fledged course a few times (and have had offers to do
it for a couple different platforms), but live streaming it kind of forces the
issue, and has helped me get a little more structure on my YouTube channel,
which has kind of been festering since 2006 :D

Now I'm considering moving on to a similar 'Kubernetes 101' at some point,
maybe. It's _relatively_ fun for me, and if it opens up possibilities of
another group like Device42 sponsoring portions of it, that would be a net
benefit IMO—most of the free content I see is absolute-ground-level and
doesn't really get far enough to make someone productive.

I know for myself, having really good intro-course-level content free would've
helped my growth earlier in my career (before I was able to get my workplace
to pay for decent training material and conference travel).

~~~
geerlingguy
One other aside, I'm often reminded of:

There's a saying "Those who can't do, teach."

I think, on the contrary, a good teacher has to not only be an expert on a
topic, but has to poke and prod it further, then distill everything about it
down to the essentials to turn it into teachable lessons.

Anyways, I figure that I have a certain amount of knowledge in my head. It
would be nice if I could spread that knowledge as far and wide as possible,
since that could ignite a bit more passion for good software and solid
automation in others.

~~~
jlgaddis
I always heard it as, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."

OTOH, I worked at a .edu for several years (networking) and was asked to teach
a course when the contracted instructor suddenly had to back out at the last
minute. That led to me teaching a course or two per semester for a few years
and, to be honest, I'm fairly certain that I _learned_ way more when I was
teaching than my students did. As you said, you have to be much more than just
an expert on the topic.

------
timClicks
Nice one Jeff! Amazed to see these kinds of sales figures. I hope that you're
saving some of the income for yourself - you deserve it.

~~~
geerlingguy
Of course, and thanks! I turned an almost-emergency 'need a replacement'
laptop purchase into a 'wow this new laptop is so much nicer' purchase.

(My 2016 non-TB MacBook Pro's battery had started ballooning and it was
getting difficult to click the trackpad. The bottom case was touching the
table in the middle and the front feet were about .5mm in the air. Didn't want
to let it get worse!)

------
stockkid
Hi Jeff, interesting statistics. Your Ansible book has been a great resource
to me. Thanks for writing it.

------
gnicholas
Of course, by blogging and posting on HN about this experience, it will be
more difficult to tell what portion of future sales is due to giving the books
away for free, and what portion is due to blogging about having done so.

Seriously, with the downvoting? This was meant to be a philosophical comment
on the self-referential effect of posting about the experience.

~~~
itake
What do you mean? By giving his book way for free, he was able to get HN
attention (and thus get more sales).

~~~
gnicholas
Right, but if the message from his blog post is "do what I did, and you'll see
similar results", then it's not sufficient just to give away your book. You
also have to have a notable story to tell about it, and then go tell that
story elsewhere. It's an indirect effect, not a direct effect. Also, if lots
of people do this, then the publicity benefit of blogging about it will shrink
because the stories won't get clicks anymore.

~~~
geerlingguy
Note that I did post about it twice
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22589339](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22589339)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22743353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22743353))
in the past, when the promo was ongoing, and those posts didn't front page.

And I admit, it's not just "make something free and sales go up"—I've probably
spent more time during this lockdown working on tying together social media +
YouTube videos + book marketing, once I noticed the uptake on the free offer.

The strangest thing to me? The 'ignition point' for going from a few hundred
to multiple thousand copies of the book being given away in just a few hours
was a LinkedIn post that was shared pretty heavily.

LinkedIn... seriously!

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mark_l_watson
Congratulations, those are great give-away and also sales numbers!

I do something similar on leanpub [1] by setting the minimum price very low,
free reading online, and a Creative Common share license and encouraging
people to share my books with their friends.

As you mentioned, leanpub makes it really easy to update books and I am
probably going to pull my books from Kindle Marketplace because of the
overhead of updating them.

I like your approach - I am tempted to copy your process.

[1] [https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson](https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson)

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geerlingguy
Yeah updating books on Amazon is a painful process; I wish they made it way
easier, but their model is very much tied to the traditional publishing model.

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mark_l_watson
Yes, but there is no reason that Amazon's self-serve Kindle publishing
platform could not support easy updates with automatic notifications to
readers (if they opt-in for notifications). Leanpub does it very well.

