Giving It Away – Lance Schonberg

Once upon a time, it was possible to give your e-book away for free on Amazon.

This was not really recommended unless you were trying to hook people into a series. Lots of hopeful authors did it anyway, forgetting that most people don’t value what they don’t pay for. Lots of hopeful authors would still be doing it if they could.

Amazon will now only let you give away your book if you’re part of the KDP Select program (which appears to mean that you only sell your book through them, something I’m not willing to do at this point) and only for a five-day period once in a while. Unless you show them that it’s available for free elsewhere, and the process seems a little bit complex where it doesn’t need to be. Which is fine. Amazon is a (gargantuan) business and the usual expectation of a business is to do its best to make money. Freemium models of certain types of content notwithstanding, it’s tough to make money when the product is free and you can’t advertise on top of it.

Why am I even worried at this point? Well, I’ve just put together what I feel is a very good sampler of my published Science Fiction and I want to give it away. Bits of the Multiverse contains four complete short stories and the first few chapters of four different novels. All of it falls under the heading of Science Fiction, and together the eight items give a good representation of the breadth of my writing in that genre. Not so much to hook readers into a series, but into my work in general.

And I don’t want to charge for it.

But there are nine and sixty ways, as the old quote goes.

Since I’m also not interested in getting into file hosting on my website beyond what’s needed to make sure everything I put here doesn’t suddenly develop holes in it, I need to find one of the other sixty-eight.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to look far. I’ve added Bits of the Multiverse to my Ko-fi shop (and here’s the link) where I’m quite free to not charge for it. Over the next little bit, I’ll probably post the link all over the place. In truth, I’ve already pinned it on my Facebook page.

I’m also starting to put together one for my work in Fantasy, too, which may or may not end up being called Scattered Realms, but have only gotten as far as selecting what’s going into it. It’s not too onerous a process to produce an e-book (well, taking a bunch of disparate things and making all of the formats match is going to be a little time consuming), even in short bites, and I hope to have it taken care of in a week or two.

So if you haven’t read anything I’ve put out there, here’s your chance to try out my fiction for free, and there’s another set of stories to come.

Be well, everyone.