There was an interesting article on Substack the other day. One of the lures for writers to set up accounts is offering paid levels and so make some money for their work. This lure is losing ground to all of the free material available on the site.
I’ll admit I’m guilty too. I use a lot of free services for various things, mostly for my website. But there is a cost of free we love to ignore.
Some Free Services
Email is a big one. Mailing a letter at the Post Office is expensive and can take days to get to its recipient. Email is instant, or at least close to it depending on when the recipient finds it in their inbox.
The cost is having ads. Since they remain popular, people must click on them. Due to tracking, the ads are tailored to you.
Credit cards are another big one. As long as you pay the balance every month, there is no charge for using the card. Instead, there is a charge to merchants each time you use it.
My website hosting service offers some free services such as security, access to WordPress and more. I do pay for these when I pay for the service.
Free eBooks
Smashwords now Draft2Digital is just wrapping up their annual summer sale. They encourage writers to offer their ebooks at big discounts, even free for this event.
Lots of people download these free books. I’ve spoken to some and they may have hundreds of free books on their devices waiting to be read.
Cost of Free
These things aren’t really free. The companies offering them have bills to pay and need income to pay them.
Setting up buttons to sell my books through PayPal or Amazon is free. They take a commission on every sale.
Amazon adds other fees as well. I found they can take as much as a quarter of any sale in fees after taking out printing costs.
My Cost of Free
My writing costs me time and effort. Some books take years to complete going through many rewrites and editing.
Picture book illustrations take time for the watercolor. Then comes the scanning, cropping, adding text and more to create the book. Each page can take several hours.
My books need to pay their way. I have no illusions I will make lots of money with them. They do need to pay for the website, printing and other costs associated with them. My time is basically free.
I have taken part in the summer sale. People look for reviews about books and I can’t afford to pay for them. So I’ve offered free books in the hopes of getting some reviews.
That is another cost of free. People take the free books and can’t be bothered to leave a review, if they ever even read the book. Free books have no value.
