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My Big Experiment in Free Content
I just posted a 2 MB PDF containing one of the Carl & Jerry stories; in this case, the February 1957 entry, "Electronic Cops and Robbers." It's a free download, and the copyright page explicitly gives people permission to redistribute it however they want. No DRM, no nags, nothing. (Ok, there's an ad for the print books on the last page.) It's part of an experiment I'm going to be performing over the coming year. I've been talking to Phillip Torrone, editor of the Make Blog, who's a very big Carl & Jerry fan. He told me that if I'm willing to post individual stories as free downloads, he'll point to them on the Blog. So that's what I'm going to do, time permitting: I'm going to upload a story every week or two, until they're all up there. All of them. Free.
There's two things at play here:
- The intention was never to make a lot of money republishing Carl & Jerry. I'm gathering items from moldy magazines that are scattered all over other people's basements and garages and putting them together so that they won't be lost. I'd like to get something back for the (considerable) time I'm putting into the project, but this isn't something I need to live on.
- I have an intuition that I will sell more print books by giving away the stories than if I simply made the print editions available. This has been the counterintuitive result obtained by a number of relatively famous SF writers, most notably Cory Doctorow, as he explained in Forbes.
In short, I've been hearing that this is the business model of the future, and I want to see if it works. If it does, I may bend some other anticipated projects in that direction.
The uploaded files will be on the order of 2MB because the illos are present at print resolution. But that's smaller than most MP3s, and although I expect some complaints about the file sizes, I like the way the illos look, and the stories can be printed without the illos spreading out into pixelated crap.
By the way, I just finished scanning the text in for the stories present in Volume 3, and will begin laying them out this weekend. There's some travel in my schedule this spring, but I'm still on track to get the third collection out sometime in May. I'll keep you posted here, and you can always run up and check my Carl & Jerry page from time to time.
Within a year, their number of readers increased by at least a factor of ten and their trade collections quadrupled in sales. Even though the material is available for free, the typical pattern of earlier volumes seeing a spike in sales occurs every time a new volume is produced.
Since the pages are posted in advance of their being collected and published, they also effectively have 10,000 proofreaders.
However, that's how it has worked for me a couple of times. I saw Girl Genius online and almost immediately ordered the full run in print. It's a dazzling piece of work, and I like having it all in one place on my shelf.
Assuming this works out, I intend to do the same thing with Souls in Silicon, a collection of my published SF stories (and a couple of new ones) relating to artificial intelligence.
Looking forward to reading it and hope your great experiment is a grand success.
Good luck.
(Anonymous)
Carl and Jerry - from out of the past they came...
I have often wondered if the science they utilized was real or bogus and have been astounded to find that - in at least some of the stories - the people and organizations are real and I can Google them to learn more.
Thamks for bringing Carl and Jerry back into print.
Oh,by the way, have you realized how similar the boys are to Frank and Joe Hardy, who - likewise - were hams?
John
Crisfield MD