Well, I guess the answer would be obvious to most of you, but it had to be pointed out to me. Yesterday I reviewed on these pages the novel Little Brother by Cory Doctorow that I had downloaded for free from his website. Even though Cory has a publisher, Tor books, and his books are available for sale in book stores and on line, he has free download sites for all his books and encourages people to translate them and distribute copies of them in countries where they're not available for publication.
He cites as his inspiration for doing this somebody saying to him once that his problem is not people pirating his work, but his obscurity. Reading his site, and reading about what he does with his books, inspired me all over again. True, I don't have a publisher for my work, but I do have the potential for putting things on the market if people want to buy a hard copy through any of the print-on-demand options available to writers these days. Why couldn't I do what he's doing and offer copies of The Paths Life Takes as a free download in PDF format at my website? I could give them the option of also purchasing a copy through Amazon.com, or maybe even making a donation through my PayPal account for the download?
Supposedly I receive around a thousand unique visitors to my Leap In The Dark blog every week, and there must be a few people who read me here at Blogcritics.org. Some of them could be curious enough to download a free copy of a novel I've written, just to check out what I've done. They won't be risking anything - all it will cost them will be the time it takes to read enough of the book to decide whether they like it enough to keep reading it or not. I don't expect everybody to like it, but maybe some of them will, and maybe some of them will like it enough to translate it into other languages for me so it can be made available for other people to read in other countries. The possibilities are endless - heck, there's even the chance a publisher will notice me and offer to publish, if not this book, then it's sequel. If this works out it will even give me the motivation to finish writing the sequel.
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