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It was thus said that the Great Dan Wright once stated: From my "The Lie that copying hurts sales" file: http://www.counterpunch.org/flint0419.html ("Sell-through" refers to the percentage of copies shipped which are actually sold, as opposed to being returned to the publisher.) As of today, according to Baen Books-a year and a half after being available for free online to anyone who wants it, no restrictions and no questions asked-Mother of Demons has sold about 18,500 copies and now has a sell-through of 65%. I would like someone to explain to me how almost doubling the sales and improving the sell-through by 11% has caused me, as an author, any harm? http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle Let's take it from my personal experience. My site (www.janisian.com) gets an average of 75,000 hits a year. Not bad for someone whose last hit record was in 1975. When Napster was running full-tilt, we received about 100 hits a month from people who'd downloaded _Society's Child_ or _At Seventeen_ for free, then decided they wanted more information. Of those 100 people (and these are only the ones who let us know how they'd found the site), 15 bought CDs. Not huge sales, right? No record company is interested in 180 extra sales a year. But ... that translates into $2700, which is a lot of money in my book. And that doesn't include the ones who bought the CDs in stores, or who came to my shows. Or take author Mercedes Lackey, who occupies entire shelves in stores and libraries. As she said herself: "For the past ten years, my three 'Arrows' books, which were published by DAW about 15 years ago, have been generating a nice, steady royalty check per pay-period each. A reasonable amount, for fifteen-year-old books. However ... I just got the first half of my DAW royalties ... And suddenly, out of nowhere, each Arrows book has paid me three times the normal amount! ... And the _only_ change during that pay-period was that I had Eric put the first of my books on the Free Library. There's an increase in all of the books on that statement, actually, and what it looks like is what I'd expect to happen if a steady line of people who'd never read my stuff encountered it on the Free Library-a certain percentage of them liked it, and started to work through my backlist, beginning with the earliest books published. The really interesting thing is, of course, that these aren't Baen books, they're DAW-another publisher-so it's 'name loyalty' rather than "brand loyalty." I'll tell you what, I'm sold. Free works." I've found that to be true myself; every time we make a few songs available on my website, sales of all the CDs go up. A lot. And I don't know about you, but as an artist with an in-print record catalogue that dates back to 1965, I'd be thrilled to see sales on my old catalogue rise. http://www.janisian.com/article-fallout.html Change in merchandise sales after article posting (previous sales averaged over one year): Up 25% Change in merchandise sales after beginning free downloads: Up 300% Emails received: 1268 as of 07-30-02 Number of emails disagreeing with my position: 9 Number of people who reconsidered their disagreement after further discussion: 5 -spc (Now isn't *that* interesting ... )