What’s wrong with getting an eBook for nothing?
ONLY EVERYTHING!
The fact that today’s readers of eBooks demand they must be free or on offer as part of an all you can read for x number of dollars per month package deal, is just so wrong!
Face it people, when you go to your supermarket to get your groceries, or to any other retail outlet you care to name, do you get what you want for nothing? No of course not. So why should you expect to get a book for free? I’ve heard some people claim it should be free because an eBook isn’t a real book, only an electronic file. Good grief morons, try engaging your brains for once in your lives! These same idiots argue that they should be able to download their favourite music for free as well. I have just two words on that particular subject – Taylor Swift!!! We need someone like her to stand up for the largely toothless contributing authors of this world…
Thanks to Amazon belabouring the fact that eBooks are electronic files, the concept of never paying for any eBook written by an Indie has become the norm. How many of you feel guilty about reading that eBook you got for nothing? More to the point, how many of those free eBooks you downloaded, have you actually read, let alone reviewed?
Doesn’t it bother you that the eBook’s author invested several months, or in some cases, years writing it? If not, it damned well should!
It’s high time you all grew a conscience and put yourselves in the author’s place for once. After all, would you go into work if you knew that you would not receive a salary for your hard work? Of course you wouldn’t!
More fool us for loving the written word, to the point where we sweat blood like you wouldn’t believe to bring you that latest book. Common decency demands that we are owed monetary recompense for all our hard work in the form of royalties, no matter the price of the book in question.
Unfortunately these days most Indies are lucky if their titles sell in the dozens per annum. Thanks to Amazon’s penny pinching change in how they pay royalties, known as KENPR or Kindle Edition Normalized Pages Read, combined with your own equally selfish attitude towards the product of our labours, if any writer thinks they will become rich these days, they’re seriously kidding themselves. We’re no different to you in that we need money to survive, but thanks to Amazon and uncaring people like you, 99.999% of Amazon’s Indie authors consider themselves lucky if they make maybe a couple of hundred dollars (US) yearly from writing.
Remember this tightwads – authors never receive royalties from those free copies you all greedily help yourselves too.
PS – if you agree with me, reblog this!!!
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Now, I'm adding my $.02 worth...
Would you work for one year? Two years? Even a decade? Would you do that for free? Less than 10% of authors are able to write as a livable profession... maybe that percentage is even lower.
I've considered the "free" route. BUT... My friend spent over a year writing a book, paid over $500 for editing services to make sure the book was good, and paid $150 for a book cover. He offered the book for $4.99, no sales, $3.99, no sales, $1.99, limited sales, finally offered it for free. On the two days he offered it for free, it was downloaded over three thousand times. The next day it went back to $1.99 and he sold a whopping five copies, of which two were returned. Thank you, Amazon. He has yet to recoup his expenses and he has had the book available for over a year. So you understand this dilemma better. Those three thousand books that went for free - that was over $1,000 in profit IF... IF the book had sold for $.99, and over $2,000 if the book had sold for $1.99. Instead, my friend has made a whopping "almost" $10 for the year. If he was living on that 'salary' he would be making about $.0048 an hour. Less than a half penny per hour. Need the math? $10 ÷ 2080. BTW, the 2080 is the number of work hours in a year 40 * 52 = 2080.
Now, I'm not saying that $2,000 is a killer earning to live on per year, but it would enhance the lifestyle somewhat.
I'm not against free books, they have their place in the marketing world. If you have a series of 3 or 5 books, offering book 1 for free would attract a reader with the possibility of future sales of the remaining series.
So, think twice when you grab that free book.
Until next I ramble on...
Now, I'm not saying that $2,000 is a killer earning to live on per year, but it would enhance the lifestyle somewhat.
I'm not against free books, they have their place in the marketing world. If you have a series of 3 or 5 books, offering book 1 for free would attract a reader with the possibility of future sales of the remaining series.
So, think twice when you grab that free book.
Until next I ramble on...
