Comments on: Free is wrong for writers; Freemium might not be

By: Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 21:03:36 +0000

Agreed! Knowing the value of your product and who your audience is are both critical to making the freemium model work.

By: Lindsay Price

Lindsay Price — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:43:37 +0000

When it comes to free and using free to sell a product, you just have to be very clear about what you'll do for free and what you won't. The more you clarify for yourself, the easier it is to put your skills into the two camps, the easier it will be for those who seek you out to figure out.

It depends on your target market as well. I've had success (ie: paying the mortgage) with 'this is free, this isn't' because I work with a very niche market that tends to be loyal – they appreciate 'free' so much that when they have money to spend they spend it with me.

By: Dan Holloway

Dan Holloway — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:40:14 +0000

I know I usualy get laughed out of town when I talk about the way writers can use the 1000 true fans model with freemium by selling merchandise and value-added products, but I came across a great example of this the other day when I was speaking to the great writing combo Deberry and Grant on twitter, who sell tie-in merchandise based on their books (not models or anything obvious, but baghs like those used by the characters in the book:
http://deberryandgrant.com/

By: PromotionalIncentives

PromotionalIncentives — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:16:36 +0000

I don't know that free is necessarily good for everyone. Yes, it's great for consumers who can scale their promotional incentives so that 1) free items are low-cost, and 2) the few buyers will essentially fund the campaign. That IS something that Anderson discusses as part of the "Freemium" model.

But that can't work for writers, since our effort isn't scalable. We just don't have a way to have a few publications pay for our time and experience, and have that fund our "free" writing. Either you write for free, or you don't. And while I like Chris Anderson's book, it takes a rather narrow view that if companies embrace this model, everything's going to be great for everyone, including the small businesses that can't afford to do free.

By: Dan Holloway

Dan Holloway — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 08:28:47 +0000

Hi Will, I've been plugging your site in a few places – I think it's a fantastic idea. The advantage of having fewer people is that your manifesto can be more radical – the more of you there are the more you have to be aware of the concerns of everyone, so there are benefits and drawbacks either way (the benefit of numbers is that we can keep a steady stream of new material – provided we don't all get block at once!). I'd love to chat about whether you'd be interested in taking part in the Free-e-day festival (http://www.freeeday.wordpress.com), a celebration of indie culture I'm running in December based around a day of events and free downloads of writing, music, art, and film. It would be great to have a webchat session on working in collectives. I'm working with a great artisan collective from Canada, and a T-shirt collective from Texas. It would be great to have another writer's group so we can all answer questions on how to pitch manifestos, who does what, hopw to create a USP and so on. Drop me a line – my email's on the website. Very best,
Dan

By: Will Hindmarch

Will Hindmarch — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 02:47:19 +0000

Sorry, I missed this before. Thanks for saying so, Dan. I saw Year Zero online just a day or so before you posted this comment and thought you looked like a similar initiative. Except, huge! You have a lot of writers involved over there — that's fantastic. Best of luck on your end, and thanks for the plug.

By: Dan Holloway

Dan Holloway — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:39:26 +0000

Will, I love the Jet Pack site. The manifesto strikes a real chord, and combines a lot of what we're trying to do at Year Zero Writers (www.yearzerowriters.wordpress.com) with the democratising manifesto and Free-e-day (www.freeeday.wordpress.com) with the commitment to giving the public access to the widest range of independent culture possible.

I have just blogged on this at www.agnieszkasshoes.blogspot.com and given a plug for Jet Pack. Very best of luck with it

By: glecharles

glecharles — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:26:10 +0000

I wasn't familiar with August's background, but he seems like a perfect example. I checked out "The Variant" and was intrigued enough by the sample to buy it. Wow! Wow!

As for Jetpack, I love "The Dirty Model" manifesto and the collective concept. It's fundamentally the same as the poetry reading I started years ago that evolved into the non-profit organization louderARTS. This whole discussion has uncovered some impressive things for me, too.

Thanks!

By: Will Hindmarch

Will Hindmarch — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 23:00:40 +0000

John August is a great example of a writer spending the time to build his own reputation for years, and then leveraging it to charge for content that is genuinely worth money — and recognized as being worth money! — by his audience. It's very tricky to get people to pay for something from a writer they aren't already keeping up with.

Thus the function of the Jet Pack writer's gallery is to generate a following with free, quality works, so that people might decide some of our work is worth paying for and, then, down the line, pay for it. Let's see if it works.

Part of what we paid for when we paid for "The Variant" was the feeling of being in on it. The privilege of being conversant in something is sometimes premium content. ("The Variant" was worth the money I paid for it all on its own, though.)

Thanks for keeping this discussion going, Guy. I'm a lot smarter now than I was a week ago.

By: Wordstudio: The Gist

Wordstudio: The Gist — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:53:31 +0000

[...] executives get a cut of the box office. We could discuss several ways the argument is flawed — Guy LeCharles Gonzalez has a great post about here about Free versus Freemium — but I only want to focus on one right now: the way it poisons [...]