The Andy Weir example. "The Martian" was originally a blog series, and actually his 3rd book. He created an ebook version of The Martian, freely downloadable a

The Andy Weir example. "The Martian" was originally a blog series, and actually his 3rd book. He created an ebook version of The Martian, freely downloadable at the time. People did give him donations though. He only added it to Kindle for $0.99, because Amazon wouldn't let him distribute it for free. It look off from there. When people would rather give the author $0.99 to make it easy to access on Kindle, than download it for free, and it becomes a bestseller, then that is a plausible way for an author to make money.