Why do you give away your work? – M.J. Carlson

Sharing my work gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question comes up most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money?

For me — for pretty much every writer — the big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity (thanks to Tim O’Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who fail to buy my book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy. People like me (people who like science fiction and related geeky stuff like comics, games, Linux, and so on) don’t really buy books. Okay, we do buy books, but not in the quite same manner that romance or mystery readers buy books. I’m more interested in sharing the ride with a wider audience than forcing that audience to buy a ticket first.

Stories, at least good stories are verbs, not nouns. They want to be copied and shared, it’s in their nature. Many of those copies have a destination, a person for whom they’re intended, a transfer from one person to another, embodying a personal recommendation between two people who trust each other enough to share information. That’s the kind of thing that authors (should) dream of, the proverbial word of mouth, “here, read this. You’re gonna love it.” By making my work available for free pass-along, I make it easy for people who love what I’ve said to help other people find my words. This is different from theft, which profit from another’s work without just renumeration. I’m morally against stealing an author’s work and selling it without passing a fair portion of the profit along to the creator, but the meaning of “just renumeration” is a topic in itself. Besides, theft has been with us for a long time and it unlikely going to go away because of DRM.

What’s more, if you’re anything like me, you appreciate the time, money, and effort an author puts into the crafting of a decent book. It’s work — damn hard work, sometimes. Most people are decent human beings, and if they read something they like, they’ll try to support and encourage the author. That means they’ll go and spend a couple of dollars on the ebook, and maybe shell out a few more for the other books, if they really like what the author has to say. The major distributors all know this, and make samples available.

The good news (for writers) is that this means that a free, serialized ebook is more likely to be an enticement to buy the full version (which is, after all, cheap and easily gotten) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen in a month or two to decide you want to read the full version and possibly own it so you can read it again if you like.

So free stuff sells books. Every writer I’ve heard of who’s tried giving away work to promote their books has come back to do it again. That’s the commercial case for doing free ebooks.

Now, onto the artistic case. It’s the twenty-first century. Copying stuff will never, ever be harder than it is today (if it does, it’ll be because civilization has collapsed, and we’ll have other problems). Hard drives aren’t going to get bulkier, more expensive, or less capacious. Networks won’t get slower or harder to access (well, okay maybe if the telecoms get their way). If you’re not making art with the intention of having it copied, you’re not really making art for the twenty-first century. Making work you don’t want copied is quaint, in the same way that it’s quaint to go to a Pioneer Village and see a blacksmith shoeing a horse at a traditional forge or forming a plow shear by hand. But it’s hardly, contemporary. I’m a science fiction writer. It’s my job to write about the future (on a good day). Art that can’t be copied is the past.

Finally, the moral case. Copying stuff is natural. It’s how we learn (copying our parents and the people around us). Art students sit in museums and copy great works of art to learn technique. Now that the Internet — the world’s most efficient copying machine — is pretty much everywhere, its only become easier. There’s no way I can stop my readers making copies. If I tried, I’d be a hypocrite: when I was 16, I was mixing cassette-tapes, photocopying stories, and generally copying in every way I could imagine. If the Internet had been around then, I’d have been using it to copy as much as I possibly could. If some genius feels inclined to copy my work, deconstruct it and learn from it or, better yet, make it better — let me know. If there’s a huge plot hole I missed or something, I’ll make the correction and give you credit for finding it. Heck, I’ll even name a victim after you in a subsequent book.

There’s no way to stop copying. The people who try end up creating more bad karma than piracy ever did. The record industry’s ridiculous holy war against file-sharers (more than 20,000 music fans sued and counting!) exemplifies the absurdity of trying to get the food-coloring out of the swimming pool. If the choice is between allowing my stuff to be copied for personal enjoyment and shared for enjoyment’s sake or being a bully, lashing out at anyone I can reach, I choose the former. Let the karma crumble.