I give my stuff away for free (and sell paper copies for profit). Publishers really help with marketing, editing, typesetting, cover design, fronting cash, and

I give my stuff away for free (and sell paper copies for profit). Publishers really help with marketing, editing, typesetting, cover design, fronting cash, and other things, which is why people go with them. But they also tend to take the rights to the book, and I didn't want that for my books. As such, I make about $100/year in donations, and paper book sales are in the hundreds of dollars per month range. My day job subsidizes this work. And all books are DRM-free once you remove the DRM from them (which is trivial to do). I try to make a product people want to pay for, not one they have to pay for. But that's just me. Jack London famously hated writing and only did it to support his lifestyle.