According to this post on Miss Snark's blog a published author is attempting to use free ebooks to avoid the 3rd book death spiral.
This is that problem whereby stores will only order as many copies of your current book as the last book sold, and since bookstores can never sell 100% of the copies they order, each book sells worse than the last regardless of its quality.
Peter Watts is hoping to use this as a publicity stunt to push his popularity.
I've seen quite a number of discussions about why this never works for unpublished authors. Is there much chance of it working for a published author? Even if the chance for success is low, is it one of the few options open to an author caught in the death spiral, or is he just going to make publishers think that he is a pain to work with, so that they won't do much to promote his future books?
This is that problem whereby stores will only order as many copies of your current book as the last book sold, and since bookstores can never sell 100% of the copies they order, each book sells worse than the last regardless of its quality.
Peter Watts is hoping to use this as a publicity stunt to push his popularity.
I've seen quite a number of discussions about why this never works for unpublished authors. Is there much chance of it working for a published author? Even if the chance for success is low, is it one of the few options open to an author caught in the death spiral, or is he just going to make publishers think that he is a pain to work with, so that they won't do much to promote his future books?