This is an email I got and it's such a good question and it's something that I've thought so much about that I figured it might make for an interesting discussion here.
Are you reading Dick Masterson's book? I noticed that some portions of the book are his blog entries (some seem to be changed around slightly). When I had an agent she was ADAMANT about not writing anything on the web that would be in a book ("Why buy a book when you can get it for free?" was her motto). What are your thoughts as a writer?
Great content creates it's own market. As long as I can create great content that people want to consume I'll find a way to monetize it. Either by building traffic on my site and selling ads or by getting a publishing deal or by adapting what I've got for either a movie or TV series.
I used to be really wedded to this idea that I'd write books. If all you want to do is write books, then the agent may have a point. I'm not sure how many people are going to buy Suicide and Keg Stands after I've released it for free on the Internet. But I'm also not John Grisham or Stephen King. No one is buying the latest novel by Ben Corman because no one knows who Ben Corman is. So if giving away Suicide and Keg Stands is the price I pay to get the kind of attention I need to write for a living, so be it. I'll happily pay that price even if it means giving away S&KS and the novel after and the novel after that.
One of the best pieces of advice I got from one of my creative writing professors was that early in your career all you're trying to do is make a name for yourself. All you're trying to do is get known. Once that happens the money will come, but until people know your name it's almost impossible to support yourself writing.
The thing I really like about writing on the Internet is that I know, without a doubt whether people like my writing or not. If they keep coming back to read me, if they tell their friends about me, if my traffic slowly grows, then I'm doing something right. If, on the other hand, my traffic flatlines and withers, then I know that I'm doing something wrong. That is a vastly better indicator of whether you have talent then simply writing a book and asking an agent or a publisher "is this good enough, does this fit with your marketing goals?" I don't want to be told that I've got a good book but they don't know how they'd market it, or that my stuff isn't going to connect with the right demographic. I'll let my readers decide whether my writing is good enough. Readers aren't concerned with marketing or demographics or focus groups. Readers read what they like.
And getting a publishing deal gets me what exactly? A spot on some shelf in a bookstore? Every time I'm in a bookstore I walk past countless books without ever giving them a second look. So do those books fail because they aren't good or because there are literally too many choices for me to investigate? I don't seek out those books because I don't know about them, that's why making name for yourself as a write is so important.
On the other side of that, as the writer, there's a lot of power with being able to connect with your readers and know if it's the quality of the work. If my traffic falls off every week until no one is coming back I can't blame my publisher for not fully supporting my book release. Direct interaction takes a lot of the unknowns out of the equation.
I'm not even sure that the agent is right about "if you give it away for free, people won't buy it." Half of Tucker's book is stories from the site and it's still selling, he's spent like 10 months a year on the NYT Best Sellers list. Paulo Coelho is pirating his own books and it's caused sales to skyrocket. I'm on a mailing list from Tor books where they send me free PDF copies of books, no strings attached. Not everyone is freaked about the possibility that if it's available somewhere for free then sales will evaporate. If that was true, libraries would have killed publishing a long time ago.
At this stage of the game, all I'm worried about is getting my name out there and my writing in front of people. If I'm good, the money will come. If not, then it won't matter if I gave my writing away for free or not.
Posted by Ben Corman at 4:12 PM