Ask Slashdot: Funding Models For a Free E-book? 128
danspalding writes "I'm an adult education teacher in SF who wrote an e-book about how to teach adults. It will be available to download for free in January 2013. I Kickstarted enough money for editing, design and publicity, but not enough to pay me anything up front. I'm considering making a $1, $10 and $25 version available from Amazon as a way for folks to donate money to me, as well as a straight up PayPal link on my site. Is it possible to produce quality material for teachers to download for free in a way that's economically sustainable? Might readers accidentally pay for a copy without realizing there's a free download and get angry? And where should I host the free-to-download version?"
Release it now, as a "Beta". (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's already written, then you're ready to go viral. We don't want to wait until January. That's not how the modern release cycle works anymore. Release it as a "Beta", with further editing to come later. What's this about funds for "Publicity"? You just nailed an Ask Slashdot, so here we are!
And what's the license? I would like for once to see texts released in one of the Creative Commons licenses, and not the straight "Copyright ___". You say your text is about teaching adults, right? So why not go with the pure "By" (Attribution) license, where you freely allow mashups and chopping and all that fun stuff that used to be praised as "Active Learning". If you try to lock down your exact words it sends a chill related to the basic school methodology of "I am the teacher, so be quiet and listen."
Meanwhile, precisely why are you asking where to host it? Isn't that what Web Hosts are for?
I'm an author who posts their books for free (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm an author who posts their books for free. I can afford too: I have a regular 9-5 job and just do this in my spare time. I'm actually an academic and so I use it to build my reputation. I have a PayPal and a Flattr link on my book pages, and I've made ... about $150 so far on my latest book - not enough to live on!
But the reason I did it that way was because of the freedom I gained. I had two books published the traditional way and the first was a horrible process driven by the publisher and the reviewers. The second was better, but I had to work hard at convincing the publisher that Interleaf was a valid document processing tool. For the third, I gave up on them and just "did my own thing," publishing alpha then beta versions over many months. So I got a presence almost from the beginning, without having to wait for the publisher's impramatur. Finally a publisher came to me to produce a paper version, and that was a much more pleasant version. Note that the publisher came to me because of the reputation I had built up by making the book open source!
So look at your goals and what you want to achieve. If you've got a writing itch that you want to scratch, then open content is a good way to go. If you want to make money, well, 99% of authors don't make a cent anyway! If you want to build reputation for use in getting invited talks, guru status, etc, then write a good well-regarded book - and get it out into the open as soon as you can.