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John Danenbarger
Take a look at the video above. Author Neil Gaiman is talking about copyright piracy, and describes the difficulty he had persuading his publisher to make one of his books available for free for a month online.
His reasoning was based entirely on numbers. After his books were pirated in Russia, a place in which he was little known, sales in the country of his next book jumped 300 percent. He compares piracy to book lending, an opportunity that allows readers to try new authors at little risk. They then buy those authors’ books in the future.
It is a controversial topic, and a complex one. Making a sample product available has long been an important part of marketing. Giving away the entire product not so much. It is possible that ebook piracy only works for some authors and only under certain conditions: people will buy when buying is easier than stealing; if Neil Gaiman’s next book had been easy to download, instead of a matter of playing with torrents, then perhaps his sales would have been lower. Other authors, and their publishers, are less happy to endorse piracy.
But Gaiman has more than 1.6 million followers on Twitter. He also writes a regular blog and answers questions on Tumblr. He gets social media and he understands the importance of community.
When he says that giving something valuable to a community brings dividends, he knows what he is talking about.
You can argue that that is also what social media is about. Every tweet you make, every status update you post, and every URL you like should be delivering valuable knowledge to a market that will want to know it, to use it, and to enjoy it. Corporate blogging, after all, is the free distribution of knowledge in the form of articles with the aim of attracting prospects and building a brand. (The SEO benefits came later.)
Those tweets and updates though are small and limited. They are snippets of information, especially when compared to an entire novel. But they do provide a channel through which you can share other, longer-form, pieces of information.
You can use Twitter to distribute your white papers, place a link on Facebook to tell people where they can download a guide to one of your products. Depending on the nature of your product, you might even be able to hand out free samples on Twitter: a free version of software, for example, or a few chapters of a manual.
Ask people to share and retweet what you are giving them, and you can create a viral effect. Your followers will tell their followers and they will pass your product around among themselves. In the process, they will be inviting their friends to try before they buy, giving you more customers for your next release.
It is not a completely new idea. Chris Anderson talked about the value of not charging in Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which he too gave away for a while. But social media has made giving value away much easier and much more powerful. Do not be afraid to use it to hand out your samples.
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