I'm giving away content to readers who help me advertise.

Hi Valerie:

What jumped out at me right away here is that you are charging now for something that's going to be free later. Isn't that, um, a way to make readers decide to wait until they can get it for free? I am genuinely asking, because I might be dead wrong here. Are they buying?

Re value-exchanged reviews, my viewpoint, I suspect, is not popular, but it's actually more practical than moral or ethical. The problem, imo, is credibility. Readers are less likely to believe a glowing review that was paid for (in whatever way) -- though they'll probably believe a negative one! If they know the practice is common but don't know which reviews are paid for and which are not, they're going to start taking all of them with a grain of salt, including those which were written purely out of the desire of the reviewer to share his or her opinion of the work. Especially raves -- so the potential readership-building impact of positive reviews is lost. When Chris Poirier of Web Fiction Guide asked for suggestions to improve the site, I suggested creating a badge saying "Non-value-exchanged review" for member reviews which are that, so readers can tell the difference. Whether they're going to do it or not, I cannot know.

Having said that, I'll add that it is standard in the dead-tree world for publishers to provide reviewers free copies of books so as to offset their expenses, whether the reviews are negative or positive. So, if I were charging for my content, I would offer it free to known and established reviewers such as (for sff) Elisabeth Barrette of Hypatia's Hoard of Reviews. (She is a pro.) Or others on this list. It doesn't guarantee that they will review, but it brings the work to their attention at least.

As to the "folks who'll wait for it to be free" conversation:

I know they're your best buddies ( ) but Baen uses this to GREAT advantage. Their free library gives away dozens and dozens of books that were once for pay, to the point that now, if it's a Baen, you can be pretty sure that at some point it'll show up in the library.

The problem is, if you're a fan of that author or if you read enough of the preview to REALLY WANT TO KNOW what happens next, you'll pay to get it in advance rather than wait for free. Sure, you'll always have the ones who'll just wait. Those people are not your True Fans. The True Fans are the ones who want what you do RIGHT NOW, and will pay for it. There are also the readers who want to read offline in a pdf viewer or *gasp* as a paperback. They just prefer it.

I'm increasingly looking at this model for the History--at the instigation of some of my own True Fans.

Whatever are you suggesting? I adore Baen!

But thanks for this.

I have never tested whether I have true fans or not. I need to. I'm afraid to.

Well, I've always published my serials in that way. When a new story would premiere, I would post a link to buy the work in its entirety. That worked relatively well. People would get so frustrated waiting for the next update that they'd go ahead and buy the whole book. (It works way better for MCM, however, who can somehow generate $4000 dollars in a month doing that. In a good month, I've gotten $150.)

Are people buying? So far, with both the new stories being up for about a week--no. I've sold two books. But one of my reasons for getting away from writing serials was to try to minimize the amount of time I had to spend on my website, to be able to focus more on writing. I haven't finished a book in over six months, and marketing/publicity/etc is eating up all of my time and creativity. At the rate that I was going, I knew that pretty soon, I wasn't going to have any content to publicize.

So, I'm trying out a different marketing model. Instead of trying to get subscribers, or people who check back in with me twice a week, I'd like to provide a site that people can run across when they're looking for something to read. If they like it, they'll stay and hopefully come back. My hope is that my free novels will become an advertisement for the novels I'm selling. The more of a "backlist" of free novels I can build up, the better. (In theory, at any rate.)

Anyway, I realize this kind of model isn't something that just blows up overnight, so I'm willing to be patient. But enough about that.

About incentives--while I agree that they can lead to a glutted group of rave reviews for a work or an author, I'm not entirely sure that the incentives weblit authors are providing can really skew things that much. Most people give out free content--extra stories, etc--or give readers the ability to dictate how a story will work or something. The point is, these incentives aren't going to appeal to people who aren't fans of the writer's work in the first place. So those people, regardless of incentives, would write positive reviews anyway (if you could actually get them to write reviews).

If we were providing incentives that had value away from our work, things that might cause people to write reviews that didn't accurately represent their opinion of the work, then I would agree that the reviews were relatively useless.

For instance, on createspace, there's a discussion of people who are trading favorable reviews on Amazon--sort of like, you give my book a review, I'll give yours a review--and I kind of get the impression they aren't even reading each other's books. Now that's bad.

I'm not sure if encouraging readers who already have a favorable opinion of a writer's work to write reviews creates a dishonest portrait of the author's work.

No, that's business. Well, it might be bad, but it's certainly nothing new. People do that all the time in traditional publishing with "blurbs"--it's called logrolling. You give me a good blurb, I'll give you a good blurb.

Like I said, it's not a popular position. It possibly comes out of the fact that I am a small-town journalist, and I feel a certain amount of frustration that I can't get more involved in some community economic development activities here because if I do, I cannot report on them (both by my own judgment and that of all the editors I've had.) I live with such rules every day. But you asked. Perhaps I've helped you make up your mind by giving you something to kick back against

Just to be clear about what I wrote, though, the problem as I see it, is not honesty; it is, to repeat, credibility. In other words, not whether the reviews accurately represent the work -- I'm sure the vast majority of them do -- but whether they are believed to. I did have Chris Poirier of Web Fiction Guide once tell me in an email that readers mostly ignore member reviews because they are "too fannish." Which to me sounded like "too positive."

It may be that I'm more worried about this than I need to be. I am just discussing a possible central crowd-funded-consumer-oriented site with someone else, and she made the point that frequent reviewers will develop a reputation with readers as having tastes similar (or, just as useful, precisely opposite) to their own, with credibility naturally growing -- and they will be the ones who gain good readerships, solving the problem. Such reviewers (caprioxbovidae springs to mind) should be encouraged.

Whatever my opinion, the FTC seems to have one. I like to think we're too small potatoes for government authorities to pay any attention to, but insofar as our plan is to become bigger potatoes......

EEK!

The FTC thing isn't such a big deal. It's always been a good idea to disclose whenever you're getting paid (or receive some non-monetary benefit) for something, just so readers know how it may potentially skew your opinion.

Please don't freak out about the FTC thing. There was a big hoo-hah about it in Octoberish that was pretty pointless. This lays things out pretty well:

http://www.pmalink.com/?p=609

Thanks. That did clear things up. A lot.