Chris Webb

Jeff Gomez, writing at one of my favorite and thought-provoking e-content blogs Print Is Dead, has a great article covering Chris Anderson’s speech at the O’Reilly TOC conference entitled “FREE: The Economics of Abundance and the Price of Zero.”

Anderson discusses several ways he and his publisher are considering making aspects of his upcoming book free, but stops short of simply releasing a free e-book:

“free book is the marketing for the non-book thing.” In his case, what he’s really selling is himself. He also acknowledged that, for his publisher, this is a difficult and different proposition. But Anderson believes that “you give away what you can give away, and you charge what you can charge for,” and that all of the iterations of the eBook or the printed book with ads — that any way you offer the “free” version — will be inferior to the real book.

Many of the “free things” Chris discusses as part of his book project are things we have discussed at my company such as advertising in books, and free sample chapters online – so there’s nothing really revolutionary about what they are considering. However if they execute on ideas like in-book advertising, they would be the first to actually do so to my knowledge.

You should head over to Jeff’s blog to read his coverage, but one item that was especially interesting was their social media focused approach to marketing his first book, The Long Tail:

Give away books to “influentials.” (This worked incredibly well for The Long Tail, where Anderson convinced his publisher to print 1,000 ARCs — many more than publishers usually print — and they ended up getting about 800 copies into the hands of interested bloggers. From this, more than 600 online reviews appeared, which then linked to Amazon. Anderson said that his Amazon sales outweighed his bookstore sales, leading him and his publishes to believe that all of that online-linking led to more Internet/Amazon sales.)

1000 review copies is generally unheard of, but look at the return on their investment – 600 highly influential reviews driving sales to Amazon.com where the book has had a permanent home on their Computers and Internet Best Seller List since its release.

Chris Anderson is also blogging about “Free” at his Long Tail blog.