SF Signal: Does Releasing a Book for Free Increase Sales?

Does Releasing a Book for Free Increase Sales?

Simon Owens article, The Creative Commons Confound: Whether releasing your book for free will help boost your sales, talks about the effect of releasing a book under the Creative Commons License, using Nick Mamatas' Move Under Ground and Peter Watts' Blindsight as exmaples.

But in this case, one blog didn't give [Mamatas] the link that he was hoping for: Boingboing. And both Watts and Mamatas agreed that the success of a book released under a CC license hinges off this crucial factor.

"The thing is, there's a confound here," Watts explained. "It wasn't the CC release per se that gave me the boost; it was all the people talking about it. Boingboing doesn't pimp every novel that comes down the pike. It has to be newsworthy in some way, and an author giving his work away is, for the time being, newsworthy. It attracts attention."