Free Books: Marketing Genius or Devaluation of Writers?
This is an excellent read about the delicate balance between offering free books and the whole future of reading, and writing.
Personally, I think the whole lowering of e-book costs, prices dropping and whatnot, is a larger reflection of our economy as a whole. As we can all tell, our daily costs are going up a rate much faster than our wages are keeping up with. Unless you’re a CEO, but I’ll leave that argument alone for now. 
I think most of us, indies and established authors both, just want to maintain a decent living doing what we love. I know that’s my goal. Here’s wishing the best for all of us.
J.S.Eaton's Night Castle Blog 
I was going to write a long diatribe of a post about just this phenom. In fact, “devaluation of the written word by Amazon” was a pivotal phrase. Thanks for the post. A galling situation for all writers, not just indies
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Thank you for your comment. It is such a fine line between offering free to promote and selling enough to make a living. And knowing where that line is drawn is more important now than ever.
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True to say though, I think, honestly, “self-publishing” as enabled by
Amazon has resulted in millions of poorly written books glutting the book markets, and that too, I think, has been a big factor, but a factor no one I know has had the nerve to mention yet. Everyone wants to be and can be today an “author.” The old time publishing “gate-keepers” were often jerks and snobs, but the great publishers like Random House and Simon & Schuster had terrific acquisition editors and refused to publish junk. They were on average consistently wise, although all of them made notorious mistakes. That’s human. Over time though, the level of discourse was higher and it rather acted as a filter against a lot of tripe. Books had status and cache just 10 years ago, but most of that has been eroded by the flood of bad books. When so many books are just plain bad, it’s bound to change public opinion of the value of a book qua book.
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