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As should be apparent from the amount of the royalty, I don't have a significant quantity of readers. They all chose to buy the book via Amazon when it was als

As should be apparent from the amount of the royalty, I don't have a significant quantity of readers. They all chose to buy the book via Amazon when it was also available on other [non-DRM] platforms. I didn't force my readers to do anything. I followed their money to the only platform that paid off. I have also elected to keep my day job. Offering free downloads wouldn't even be a waste of bandwidth, really--just a waste of server disk space. I don't have interests in both writing and marketing, so it doesn't make much difference to me if I am not making any money because no one knows who I am, rather than not making any money because nobody who knows who I am can figure out how to pay me anything. Also, the only person who bought the book for whom I can be certain that they actually read it is my Mom, who left the most passive-aggressive 5-star review I have ever seen--simultaneously shilling for it and telling me how I should write the next book.

a3_nm 10y ago
> Offering free downloads wouldn't even be a waste of bandwidth, really--just a waste of server disk space You are very humble. :) I would be very surprised if there isn't someone who considered reading your work but didn't because it wasn't available online for free. In fact, if your comment contained a direct link to a free copy of your work, someone from HN would already have looked.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  Such a post would definitively link a pseudonym username to a real name. I'd have to create a throwaway. It would also be offtopic anywhere but a Show HN thread, and even then seems iffy. The only bit of technical interest would be the script I wrote to finagle 7Zip into outputting a valid .EPUB file. 7Zip and plaintext editors were the only tools used. I'm not sure whether I am more afraid that no one would look, or that it would get an HN hug of death.

a3_nm 10y ago

> Offering free downloads wouldn't even be a waste of bandwidth, really--just a waste of server disk space You are very humble. :) I would be very surprised if there isn't someone who considered reading your work but didn't because it wasn't available online for free. In fact, if your comment contained a direct link to a free copy of your work, someone from HN would already have looked.

logfromblammo 10y ago
Such a post would definitively link a pseudonym username to a real name. I'd have to create a throwaway. It would also be offtopic anywhere but a Show HN thread, and even then seems iffy. The only bit of technical interest would be the script I wrote to finagle 7Zip into outputting a valid .EPUB file. 7Zip and plaintext editors were the only tools used. I'm not sure whether I am more afraid that no one would look, or that it would get an HN hug of death.