Generosity marketing is not marketing

I delved into this a little in today's video on Jason Chatraw's blog but it has been the hot topic of speculation since Amazon started its freebie program: is giving away books going to kill us or save us?

Guess it depends on which "us" you are in. I don't want this to be a writing blog, but this is a fleeting historic opportunity to explore generosity marketing, or my preferred nomenclature of "idea gardens." Getting on a million Kindles for free is great for sharing your ideas--who knows whether most of the books will be read, because even though it is voluntary, it takes very little investment on the reader's part. See, click. And with hundreds of sites and Twitter feeds constantly pumping out free book links, we may already be past the point where "free" has value.

And there is a dark side. Free books often get to people who don't want them and don't value them. They will write negative reviews like (yes, this is real), "I got this because it was free but I don't like ghost stories" and the new manifestation, the "Blame the author One-Star" where someone is mad because a book they were told was free (often because the reader stumbled across a days-old blog post) is not free when the reader finally shows up to get it, or they clicked and it didn't download for some reason.

Although this is mind-blowing to me, I hear some writers try to scam by announcing a book as free and then secretly making it not free in hopes of netting unwilling purchases...that is a suicidal tactic in every possible respect. The larger point is that free is not free. It is still a transaction of time, energy, resources, ideas. Fundamental principle of free: once you give it away, it isn't yours anymore.

You are giving away your idea (your seeds, your book) to a reader (who may not be a reader at all, especially not your reader) and hoping the idea blossoms on the other side, in the other person's garden. Whether the other person's idea in the exchange comes in the form of their time or money, or both, it is now in their garden, not yours.

If you can give away without any expectation of return, that is "generosity marketing." That's how the garden works. And the irony is if you don't want or need or expect a reward for your gift, you are more likely to benefit. Because you win either way. If you're going to be free, let free be free.

Free today: Missing Pieces story collection for Kindle
Reading: Robert McCammon's Mystery Walk
Touting: The Epic Kindle Giveaway blog for free kindle thrillers
Warning: Mystery Dance: Three Novels is free for Kindle Friday-Sunday (please review it if you've read the three books in it--Disintegration, Crime Beat, and The Skull Ring.)
Watching: Recently watched District Nine, Inception, and one of the Twilight movies where Pattinson sulks (does that narrow it down?)
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Your Idea Garden: First you have to dig it

The brilliant and weird Seth Godin is something of the outlier's outlier, the weird "thought leader" who is about 20 years ahead of his time. While he wrote an entire book on being weird, a brief online interview summarizes his point.

I have revolutionized my thinking and acting since Christmas. I had great success last year with my ebooks, largely due to luck--circumstance, the explosion of the digital market, a stack of content built over 15 years of often unrewarding effort (besides the satisfaction of complete commitment to craft and story). All that culminated in a book deal with Amazon's new publishing imprint.

I thought I could sit back and not worry any longer, or pay attention to the things that had helped my success. It was more than laziness, it was the notion that I had arrived at some plateau and could now coast a while. Amazon patiently coaxed me up the charts with their marketing plan, and Chronic Fear was ranked #83 on the Christmas Eve Kindle list. I went to bed with dreams of rock stardom and awoke to a book ranked #140 and sliding rapidly--the market had become extremely volatile, indies who hadn't been resting on their smugness had paid attention to the new Select program and played the system to claim that Christmas bestseller list, and I had basically surrendered any power I might have had.

To apply my gardening metaphor, I had cast all my seeds into someone else's garden and hoped they would bring me back a bumper crop at the end of the season, without getting my own hands dirty. I instantly took action, put together the Epic Kindle Giveaway and gave away more than 100,000 books in three days, and recently followed that up with the Big Kindle Boogie, with 118,000 downloads in three days. Combined with the other participating writers, that was about 750,000 free books in a few weeks. While the sowing didn't spring full-grown into blossoms and produce, more than a quarter million of my books have been loaded onto Kindles in the last six weeks.

I am not concerned about whether that is the right "long-term strategy." There is no long-term strategy in a digital era, because there are no long terms, merely fleeting mini-eras, short seasons where certain crops will thrive and others will wither. This is the "free book era," and the advent of the lending library and wholesale bulk delivery. Since digital content is free or cheap, it makes sense to deliver that content in grand quantities. After all, the best blog posts are shared thousands of times in a day and then become yesterday's news. And when the content is delivered with what I call "generosity marketing" (although it is really not marketing at all), you have an unbeatable value-added combination. Everyone is served, and all involved gain something of value. The garden, with seeds to spare, and a crop to keep me and others alive until the next planting season.

But you have to get your hands dirty first. If you aren't smelling the mud, you don't have a foundation. No place for roots. Nothing to stick your seeds in. Find your dirt and cram your fingers into the soil, feel it, smell it, taste it, absorb it through osmosis. I am glad Chronic Fear didn't end up a Top 10 bestseller, or I would have missed my return to my roots and all I have learned in these past six weeks. My hands are filthy and I am grinning.

Free for Amazon Feb. 10-12:
MAD STACKS: Story Collection Box Set
http://www.amazon.com/Mad-Stacks-Story-Collection-ebook/dp/B0076BMCA2

LITTLEFIELD: Two Supernatural Thrillers
http://www.amazon.com/Littlefield-Two-Supernatural-Thrillers-ebook/dp/B004T3G12K

AMERICAN HORROR
http://www.amazon.com/American-Horror-ebook/dp/B0054R09VO



Reminder that Robert Shane Wilson laid down a poignant audio rendition of my international Writers of the Future award-winning story "The Vampire Shortstop" at Dark Audio. Grab the mp3 for your commute or listen to the 43 minutes on the blog.
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Idea Gardens: Ebooks as Playgrounds

I've come to think of my books as just little "idea gardens" or "idea machines." The word "book" is mostly taken as an artifact, a tangible object you buy, read, and put on a shelf. You don't really "consume" it because it is still there, in the same form as it was before.

Ebooks are currently like that--a fixed text, although with links and some options available such as "choose your own adventure" or "alternate endings" (I have two endings in Disintegration because the original was far too dark for most people.) But there is no real need for a "book" to be an artifact anymore. I am going to develop a Google+ area where people can play inside my books, develop their own characters and stories, add art, etc.

From my participation in the online social events Epic Kindle Giveaway and Big Kindle Boogie, I learned that people want more than just a "book"--they want experience. And increasingly, that experience is interactive and online and now.  I see no reason besides some technological limitations and weird, instilled ego perceptions of "myth ownership" to prevent us from doing that. Surely it is the corporatizing of creativity that has fed these ideas--when Mickey Mouse has more rights than the human who first doodled out the whiskers, that is chillingly wrong in my view, and when some of the major media forces in the U.S. are paying off politicians to enact government Internet control on their behalf (SOPA), that is chillingly sick at the root of our civilization.

That doesn't mean I support piracy. I don't even care about that, that's a different conversation. I am talking about freely opening our idea gardens for other people to play and plant and grow. If you have any ideas on how to do that, why not plant them here?