Some personal thoughts on authors' giveaways
I had written that I'd want to read a particular author's work before buying a book by them. ![[info - personal]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lee_rowan pointed me to a free short story by that author at All Romance e-books.
My reply:
(*Rushes over to All Romance.*)
However (not to sound ungrateful, which I undoubtedly do), this seems the proper time to explain why free online samples and free short fiction aren't of much use to me when I'm deciding whether to buy a book.
In a nutshell, it's because I'm a long-fiction reader. I can't judge very well whether short stories are well done, because my preferred mode of reading is novellas and novels. A novelette might squeak by, but I avoid reading short stories. Otherwise, I'd be spending much more time at e-zines than I do. (Also, an author might be good at writing short stories but be lousy at writing novels.)
This is why, in the past few years, nearly every author I've bought either (1) has books available in libraries or (2) started off as an author of long-length online fiction. Recently, thanks to places like this and this, I've also added, "Makes one of their professional novels available online for free."
As an example: Naomi Novik came highly recommended to me by a friend who shares my literary tastes. Ms. Novik has sample chapters and free short fiction at her Website. Even so, I just couldn't get a sense of whether her novels were worth buying. So I waited until her novels were available at an online library for the blind, Bookshare.org (which took a while), and read them.
Now I buy every new novel she puts out . . . but if her first novel had been available online back when she was first recommended to me - as it is now - I would have read it right away and bought her second, third, and fourth novels at the time they were published.
This is the reason why, despite the fact that I've been hanging out in the gay romance community since 2005, I've bought no gay romance books, except by authors who have also posted online novels. I'm afraid I've simply been burned too many times at the public library (taking home books that looked great from their blurbs and discovering that the books weren't to my taste) to want to take a chance with an author whose long fiction I haven't read.
I understand all the financial reasons why many professional authors - especially e-book-only authors - prefer not to place their novels online, but I can't really change how my reading Muse works, unfortunately.
This is probably just my own personal problem and doesn't reflect on authors' marketing strategies. But hey, I'll use this as an opportunity to start a thread to see what other readers here think about the length of giveaway fiction. Does the length of giveaway fiction make a difference to you folks who are reading this?
lee_rowan pointed me to a free short story by that author at All Romance e-books.My reply:
(*Rushes over to All Romance.*)
However (not to sound ungrateful, which I undoubtedly do), this seems the proper time to explain why free online samples and free short fiction aren't of much use to me when I'm deciding whether to buy a book.
In a nutshell, it's because I'm a long-fiction reader. I can't judge very well whether short stories are well done, because my preferred mode of reading is novellas and novels. A novelette might squeak by, but I avoid reading short stories. Otherwise, I'd be spending much more time at e-zines than I do. (Also, an author might be good at writing short stories but be lousy at writing novels.)
This is why, in the past few years, nearly every author I've bought either (1) has books available in libraries or (2) started off as an author of long-length online fiction. Recently, thanks to places like this and this, I've also added, "Makes one of their professional novels available online for free."
As an example: Naomi Novik came highly recommended to me by a friend who shares my literary tastes. Ms. Novik has sample chapters and free short fiction at her Website. Even so, I just couldn't get a sense of whether her novels were worth buying. So I waited until her novels were available at an online library for the blind, Bookshare.org (which took a while), and read them.
Now I buy every new novel she puts out . . . but if her first novel had been available online back when she was first recommended to me - as it is now - I would have read it right away and bought her second, third, and fourth novels at the time they were published.
This is the reason why, despite the fact that I've been hanging out in the gay romance community since 2005, I've bought no gay romance books, except by authors who have also posted online novels. I'm afraid I've simply been burned too many times at the public library (taking home books that looked great from their blurbs and discovering that the books weren't to my taste) to want to take a chance with an author whose long fiction I haven't read.
I understand all the financial reasons why many professional authors - especially e-book-only authors - prefer not to place their novels online, but I can't really change how my reading Muse works, unfortunately.
This is probably just my own personal problem and doesn't reflect on authors' marketing strategies. But hey, I'll use this as an opportunity to start a thread to see what other readers here think about the length of giveaway fiction. Does the length of giveaway fiction make a difference to you folks who are reading this?
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