Results of Free, Online Edition of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods
July 12, 2008 – 9:51 am by Thomas GideonThis seems to be the week where many publishers’ experiments with giving works away are coming to fruition. I already shared Bloggasm’s interview with authors participating in Tor’s free ebook promotion. Now Neil Gaiman shares the results of the edition of American Gods that was posted online to celebrate his blog’s seventh anniversary.
Curious that both programs could be described as cross subsidies to drive site traffic and that both were limited time offers. It is progress, I suppose, but still falls short of the incredibly high bar authors like Matthew Wayne Selznick and Cory Doctorow set by releasing their ebooks under a perpetual CC license.
Neil shares pretty much the entire letter from his publisher (scan down to the third section of the post), Harper Collins, with some relevant stats from Bookscan. The results are generally positive with the only ding coming, rightly so, in the frustration the majority of readers felt with the poor online format. There is hope, both on that front and that we’ll see more freely available works from Gaiman and his publisher again:
Given that Harper Collins sold a lot more of all my books while the free American Gods was out there, with sales of all my titles up 40% through independent bookshops, I think I can safely say that we’ll be doing it — or rather, something similar — again. And that the 56% of people who didn’t enjoy the online reading experience may be a lot happier with how we do it next time out.
