Thinking of Posting Novels for Free....

I post short stories for free on my web site. I may someday collect them and self-pub a bunch as a single volume, but I don't feel any urgency about that.

And...I feel conflicted about it. These stories are actual work. People should get paid for actual work. Just because I don't care about the money doesn't mean other writers should feel the same. Am I undercutting them? Am I feeding the "you should be glad to be paid in exposure" monster?

I excuse it because I'm at a weird point career-wise, and I want people to see I'm still writing. But I'm not sure I'm being a good authorly citizen.

I never heard of wattpad before. That seems like a good place for self-publishers to get some readership if the story's any good.

Auteur said:

I never heard of wattpad before. That seems like a good place for self-publishers to get some readership if the story's any good.

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Wattpad is great for what it is, but I'd be wary of using it as a place to get rigorous editorial feedback. It can be a great place to meet other writers and acquire a cheering section, but I've seen an awful lot of cases of people not hearing what they'd really need to hear there.

c.m.n. said:

Yeah, I've never had one comment at Wattpad and have been over there more than 6 months. I know it's because I don't go to the forums there and chat up other authors, which is what you apparently have to do to get reads.

Or join a contest.

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It's very much a social site. And yeah, contests will do it. Everybody loves running contests and creating badges.

Be careful of Wattpad or anywhere you post online due to plagiarism. Plagiarism is a huge problem on Wattpad. Writers have had their works stolen on there and posted on Amazon or either authors have had books stolen from retailers and posted on Wattpad. Just be careful and realize that when you post anything free it's a big risk but Wattpad has had major issues with plagiarism. An author friend of mine had her books plagiarized from Amazon last year and some scammer posted them on Wattpad and was getting praised for them. The thief was some content mill place overseas. Luckily, a fan of my friend's visits Wattpad and saw her books on there. She told my friend and my friend posted it on many FB groups and drummed up help from other authors to bring awareness. The titles had been changed but everything else was the same. The "person" just cut and pasted about three of my friend's books and stuck them on Wattpad.

lizmonster said:

I post short stories for free on my web site. I may someday collect them and self-pub a bunch as a single volume, but I don't feel any urgency about that.

And...I feel conflicted about it. These stories are actual work. People should get paid for actual work. Just because I don't care about the money doesn't mean other writers should feel the same. Am I undercutting them? Am I feeding the "you should be glad to be paid in exposure" monster?

I excuse it because I'm at a weird point career-wise, and I want people to see I'm still writing. But I'm not sure I'm being a good authorly citizen.

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No one's ever paid me for doing the dishes...

But seriously: There are countless free stories online, from short stories to massive web serials. What you and you alone choose to do with your story isn't going to affect others, and as long as you approve of what you're doing, do it. You can stop posting free stories and self-pub them as a collection any time you want.

As for the original topic: This is something I've been strongly considering. Part of it is that publishing really isn't that profitable for almost all writers; another is that if I had to pick one, I'd prefer the feeling of people enjoying my stories over getting rich from writing. But what it mostly boils down to for me is that thinking about publishing my writing fills me with so much anxiety and pressure that it takes all of the fun out of writing, and what would be the point then?

(I haven't posted anything online yet, because just because I'm considering that doesn't mean I don't want it to be as good as it can be.)

I feel the same thing about that is I feel about free giveaways.

They don't work. Most people that download free stuff don't even bother to read 99% of the stuff they download, and they consider it worth what they paid for.

A (maybe) slight tangent -

I'm sitting on several ARC's for the first two novels in my Extinction series, and am considering giving them away (signed by me) to people who contact me via my FB author page. If I do that, I'll politely ask for an honest Amazon review.

I have no idea if this is a good idea or not though.

indianroads said:

I'm sitting on several ARC's for the first two novels in my Extinction series, and am considering giving them away (signed by me) to people who contact me via my FB author page. If I do that, I'll politely ask for an honest Amazon review.

I have no idea if this is a good idea or not though.

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ARCs are a very different thing, and are purely a promotional tool. I'd tell folks up front you'd prefer to give away the book to people who plan to write an honest review - you can't enforce that, but you can at least make the expectation clear.

Al X. said:

I feel the same thing about that is I feel about free giveaways.

They don't work. Most people that download free stuff don't even bother to read 99% of the stuff they download, and they consider it worth what they paid for.

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There's some truth in this, but honestly, my TBR pile is choked with books I've paid for. I could see not assuming the read/download ratio is going to be high, but I don't know that it'll necessarily get you fewer actual reads.

indianroads said:

A (maybe) slight tangent -

I'm sitting on several ARC's for the first two novels in my Extinction series, and am considering giving them away (signed by me) to people who contact me via my FB author page. If I do that, I'll politely ask for an honest Amazon review.

I have no idea if this is a good idea or not though.

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You can try it. But keep in mind that giveaways have a poor rate of resulting in reviews. Even with sites like NetGalley where writing reviews is required in order to continue receiving ARCs, people download tons of titles and don't always follow through with writing reviews.

I'd avoid Wattpad. It's mostly for teens from what I hear, and readers don't usually buy other stuff you have for sale.

I gave away a lot of books. I'd do it through Amazon, and/or the other vendors (Apple, B&N, etc.). That way, all the rights are still yours, and there are lots of places that you can advertise your free book for free. If you're interested in how I did it, details are here: https://absolutewrite.com/forums/sh...n-s-Once-Upon-a-Time-Publishing-Journey/page3,

another thing to think about is rights grabs. Kris Rusch recently wrote about Patreon owning the rights to anything up there. Mostly, this doesn't matter because mostly people with Patreon aren't famous and won't become famous...but one of these days, one will, and Patreon will do the cash grab in the movie deal, and it'll be ugly for the author.

I do 100% sympathize with being tired of trade and tired of self-pub and tired of the business/promotion end of writing altogether. It's a lot of work either way, and most writers just want to be left alone to write and have fun with it. I haven't found an answer to that problem, I'm sorry to say, but I do wish you the best. And remember, you can just wait another year or two or three to decide. Your attitude will surely shift, and your tolerance for BS of whatever sort will wax or wane. Best of luck figuring it out.

I have done this, under a pen name that I don’t use for my other writing. It’s solely for the purpose of sharing some writing I was doing for fun with readers I hoped would enjoy it. The experiment has been successful in that sense. Maybe I’ll self-pub it someday, maybe not.

I think the key is to be clear on your goals. When you post stuff for free, it’s akin to posting fanfic, even when the content is 100 percent yours. If you’re okay with that model, and not expecting it to translate into anything else, it can work.

I am doing that with my first eBook. Why limit the audience. It's not a crazy idea.

Looking at it from a reader's point of view, the time investment is a bigger deal than the monetary investment. If your book intrigues me enough to want to spend hours of my free time on it, I'll happily pay you a few bucks for it, too. If it's not my thing, then giving it to me for free can't spark interest that isn't there.

jorge said:

I am doing that with my first eBook. Why limit the audience. It's not a crazy idea.

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It's not a crazy idea, but to be clear, lack of visibility will limit your audience far more than price. If you're going to post outside of a venue like Amazon, you're going to need promotion that'll drive people to your work. Nobody's going to download anything if they don't know it exists.

I never download or otherwise get free stuff. A thousand tons of junk is still junk. You will be totally invisible to me. And I suspect many other people feel the same way.

M/M Romance does fairly well in Amazon's Kindle Store. That's the only place I'll go for free books that I hadn't agreed to review for an ARC. Kindle Select (for readers' Kindle Unlimited subscription service) requires that your books are exclusive (ie, not shared anywhere else), but you don't have to use Select/KU to put ebooks up on Amazon. Kindle Create makes formatting and uploading a .mobi file easy. You would need to make sure you have the rights to the cover art.