alt Hacker NewsHeh. You picked the absolutely wrong author to say that. His making the book a free download tripled his sales in the first week.
Quoting from:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2enwks/iama_science_f...
So I saw two options. 1: Book tanks, nobody can read it; or 2) book tanks, anyone can read it. I saw no option where Blindsight would ever make money. So what the hell, thought I-- I may die poor, but maybe I won't die completely obscure. Told my editor I was going to set everything free under a Creative Commons license-- it would have broken the contract, but Cory Doctorow had been getting away with it for years and besides, I figured my writing career was pretty much kaput anyway. Editor asked me to wait a month, to see if things turned around. I waited. They didn't. Finis.
The week after I started giving Blindsight away, sales tripled. The rest is history.
Yes, I know that technique. I also know people who go for free books exclusively on Kindle. They don't want to pay for anything. That isn't helpful to people who are selling books in order to help support themselves and undermines the market for new book sales.
I know writers who tried giving their book away for free, and got almost no sales or good reviews afterwards. They aren't all selling terrible books either.
Would you seriously ask a taxi driver to give you free rides before they got paid? Or would you ask a teacher to work for six months unpaid in order to get a couple of years work later on?
I know this mentality is encouraged in some places with interns, but it is a luxury of people who can already support themselves.