About 5 months ago I blogged about how Thomas Nelson Publishers was beginning a new initiative to capture bloggers and the groundswell that they can build when they blog about books.
Essentially, Thomas Nelson was giving stuff away for free. Guess what, it still works.
Apparently the rest of the industry is catching on as well, as many of them have signed with Scribd to release publications to Scribd’s community free of charge.
“Free” just works. It does, but unfortunately a number of us still aren’t “catching on” to have truly effective this pattern and ethos is.
Let me tell you, from personal experience, that “giving away” in this new digital economy has a far larger impact than you can possibly imagine.
And it just makes sense in terms of who we are as a people.
Are you giving “freely” as much as you possibly can in and through your online assets?
[Image from Eelssej_]
Adam_S says
The other part of that is multiple formats. Thomas Nelson is giong to start giving away an ebook copy with every hardback (slowly rolling it out across their new books.). Multiple formats mean that the customer can consume in the way that makes sense for them at that time, not that makes most sense for the publisher. The customer may read one book all in the hardback, or may switch back and forth between the ebook and the hardback depending on where they were.
Baen, a science fiction publisher, has suggested that all of their authors give away several of their books. The result is that I have read a lot of free books, but also that I bought a lot of books that I would have never read otherwise.
davidnorman says
free books are cool (i'd love some please!), but i think it has more to do with the book reviews hitting the blogs. when someone you read and trust has a positive experience with a book, it's natural to want to join them in that
Adam_S says
I agree that blogs and people that I trust good places for books. I am a member of Goodreads.com that is essentially a social networking site for people that read books. But I am a bit wary of bloggers reviewing stuff that was sent directly to them by publishers (or other manufacturers). Journalists have pretty good standards on not allowing the relationship to influence the review, but I am not sure many bloggers have similar standards. Not that they are lying in their review but they may not be as critical as they should be. Especially as Christians we sometimes have the perspective that we should only say good things about a product.
I know that Christianity Today's Music blog has written a lot about this. They believe that there should be a critical review when they do not think a product is as good as it should be. They said that they get lots of complaints about the fact that they write critical reviews from people that think that just because it is Christian is should be reviewed well.
All that said, I still think that publishers that understand social networks and the web know that getting their products in the right hands makes a huge difference.
brianfalexander says
I love free stuff. I've got a lot of studd more so recently with this blog book think. It's awesome!