For months, a debate has raged about free eBooks. To find out more about the strategy, we interviewed a writer who counted 100,000 downloads of his free eBook.
Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu was Ron Hogan, director of e-marketing strategy at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s trade & reference division (and former senior editor of GalleyCat).
Today he discussed his new translation of Lao Tzu‘s Tao Te Ching–writing the spiritual text in the plainspoken, dynamic style of author David Mamet. Hogan also explained the strategies he used to grow his project–earning 100,000 free downloads of his text. The book has been available as a free download–and now, a new print edition.
Press play on the embedded player to listen to the whole interview.
Hogan revealed his audience-building strategy: “When I was first putting it up, I went around to all the websites that I could find that had information about Taoism and I basically offered them the link as something they might want to add to their blogroll. I was lucky in that a number of sites that collated translations added me to their sites. One of the biggest developments was when I edited the link into the Wikipedia page for the Tao Te Ching as part of the resources available there–so people were discovering it through Wikipedia.”
He also addressed the thorny topic of free eBooks and other giveaways: “I think absolutely the evidence seems to be in at this point that some use of free and promotional giveaways help sell copies of the book in the long run. Whether it’s from people who download the book and then discover that they love it so much they want an actual copy for themselves or people who download the book and tell people [to buy it]. It definitely has some effect in spurring interest.”