We want people to read our books, even if they read them for free. This isn’t anything revolutionary – unless your local librarian is a subversive of the highest order.

To best accomplish this goal we release all of our books online for free. Because we know how good ‘real’ books feel in your hands, we also price our trade-paperbacks via a sliding scale system in which the base price is the cost for us to ship you a book (we don’t make a penny) and you set the final price by choosing what you’d like to contribute (if anything) to the creative team behind it (most of which goes to the author). You can’t ever be ripped off. We call this pro-artist, pro-audience system neo-patronage.

There are a whole bunch of reasons we are doing this. Some of them are idealistic (we trust people!). Some of them are economic (we want everyone to be able to afford our books!). Some of them are philosophical (we believe it is a better system!). Some of them are technological (flow with technology, don’t fight it!).

You can read more on their philosophy of publishing at their site, but in effect, they’re happy enough if someone downloads and reads their books. They’re even happier if someone orders a book at cost and they make nothing, since again someone is reading their books. If the person wants to pay more, it goes directly to the creative team behind the book–which they mention means mostly the author, but presumably includes the designer, editor, etc.

The whole thing reminds me of the 1,000 True Fans idea I blogged a while back, and could be a great way to establish a following that could take you into the mainstream. Or who knows, could support you outright.

I’m currently listening to a podcast of the first chapter of Ash Dogs by Justin Nicholes, a novel about a recently discharged marine, looking to get back the parts of himself that he lost in Iraq. Check it out.

(Thanks, Groundswell Collective.)

While definitive figures on sales generated by self-published books are hard to come by, there are estimates that they could be well into the billions of dollars. A report, Under the Radar by the Book Industry Study Group estimated that non-calculated sales by smaller publishers and self-publish companies could be as high as $14.2bn (£7.3bn) in 2005, the last year statistics were available.

A quick look at Lulu’s list of best-selling fiction has an author who turned his self-published novel into a book deal with St Martin’s. Admittedly, he writes somewhat Christian fiction, which is a market that’s been under served by traditional publishing houses, but even so it’s encouraging.

Another interesting site mentioned in the article is Wowio.com, an online store that sells nothing but ebooks.

So go read that. When you’re done, there ought to be some more posts here.

Why does it work? From the Guardian book blog:

… giving away free digital copies of books makes a lot more sense that giving away free digital copies of music. Downloading a couple of chapters allows you to see how much you might like an author unknown to you. The point being that most of us who like what we read are then likely to go on and purchase the physical copy of the book, because so few of us have the stamina to read an entire book from a screen.

Coelho is one of the biggest names I’ve heard of adopting the strategy espoused by Cory Doctorow, et al. My guess is that we’ll see free sample chapters as a mainstream marketing strategy in a year or two, if not complete works. Good news for writers just starting out: setting up a torrent of your novel could emerge as a viable (and cheap) way of bootstrapping yourself into a publishing contract.

Exciting!