McGuiness wrote:I first discovered RFC's books one day at my local library when I found "The Shiva Option" among one or two of his other books. Since SF and Fantasy are my two favorite genres, I grabbed it off the shelf, and honestly, to this day I think it's one of his best books. I petitioned my library to buy the entire series, and found its prequel "In Death Ground" to be terrifying, as the Bug war kicked off and the humans and 'cats took it in the teeth. (And became lunch.)
The library only had two of the Honor Harrington series, and although I begged them to buy the rest, they shot me down. They did buy "War of Honor," which to my utter shock came with a CD in the back that had every previous book in the Honorverse on it, plus several other series of RFC's and some of his solo novels. I don't think I came up for air for at least two or three months! That CD got me completely hooked on the Honorverse, and filled in all the blanks in the one or two books of his other series that my library somehow hadn't sold off.
My local library has a bad habit of selling donated books even if they don't have a copy of the donated book on the shelves to check out. This is really annoying if they're about to sell a book that would fill a gap in an ongoing series which they've only partially completed. I've found it helpful to plop such books on the front desk at checkout and inform them that they can fill a gap in a series if they'll put it on the shelf, and they're good about doing that. I guess they just don't want to sort through the donated books to see what they have and what they don't...
At the point that RFC and Baen decided to make his earliest books - including entire series from earlier in his career available to late-coming readers for free, they rolled the dice on losing the sales those books might still have generated. However, they gained thousands and thousands of new fans to several of his ongoing series - Bahzell, Honor, "The Stars at War," Dahak, the 1632 series with Eric Flint, and some fabulous solo novels like "The Excalibur Alternative."
One day I looked on the library shelf, not expecting that RFC would have new novel for a while, (or that they'd buy it without me begging them if he did!) and there sat "Off Armageddon Reef!" I took it home and read it twice, and checked it out at least twice more before finally buying the eBook. I've picked up every novel in the series the day it came out ever since, although I prefer eBooks because they don't weight anything and I can adjust the text size on my computer screen, plus I can scan them for the ridiculous amount of research I do in writing far too many of my posts!
RFC didn't need to give away all those eBooks, but in my case, doing so led to me convince my library to buy a lot of his books, and when they wouldn't, I filled in the blanks myself. (They now consider him a first-line author and have his books available within a week of the publish date.) Having those books on the library shelves continues to expose more and more readers to his books, and yeah, those inaccurate but cool looking covers do hook a lot of readers. So by giving away his older books, some which were out of print, he gained future sales and a bunch of new readers.
Eric Flint, who as we all know has co-written several books with RFC including the Torch books in the Honorverse (and who we owe Honor's life to by speeding up the timeline!) puts his books in the Baen Free library three months after they're issued in mass paperback, and they're all still in print. So clearly he, RFC, and Baen know what they're doing. My local library only had 1632 and 1634:The Baltic War (co-written by RFC) so I was thrilled to find the earlier books in the series in the Baen free library.
Thank you RFC for giving the "Ok" to put that CD in your novels, since it gave me and so many others the chance to be introduced or catch up on every book in many of your series. I'm sure you've gained many more readers and have more sales by giving those eBooks away than you ever would had we been left to our own resources to find copies of your earlier books, and you gained a great deal of goodwill as well.
98% agree. I'm not quite as keen on the later books in the "1632" series (or the Multiverse series) as you apparently are, but apart from those, I'm with you all the way. I got some of the early books (legitimately) for free, but I don't make a habit of it. I'm a firm believer that "the labourer is worthy of his hire", and that if I find a book is worth reading, it's worth paying for. Besides, if an author doesn't get any reward for the work he puts into his writing, he won't be able to afford to do it, and we the readers won't get the books we want. I never got WAREZ computer games, for the same reason.
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