free book from oprah results in sales
My post about musicians and the concept of “free” music on the internet is now followed here by news of an actual free book online, as in giving it away for free. Chris Anderson wrote on his blog about how Oprah Winfrey gave away Suze Orman’s book “Women and Money.” The interesting point to this PR piece (because, really, that’s what it was) is that after the giveaway the book leapt to the top of the Amazon SALES chart…see below.
“The Oprah touch doesn’t just work for traditional books. More than 1 million copies of Suze Orman’s “Women & Money” were downloaded after the announcement last week on Winfrey’s television show that the e-book edition would be available for free on her Web site, for a period of 33 hours….”
Anderson goes on to say - “For fun, I plotted the sales of the book on Amazon for the past month, which includes more than three weeks before it was available for free and a bit less than one week since it was given away for a day and half on Oprah’s website. Here’s the data, thanks to TitleZ:”
As he says - “Certainly looks like free books didn’t hurt her sales.”
February 21st, 2008 at 9:44 am
Though it is on a much smaller scale, I bought the Matthew Dear CD (an actual CD mind you) after hearing the free track here.
February 21st, 2008 at 4:56 pm
I’m not sure I would equate books and music so much. people are still averse to reading a whole novel online whereas most people don’t seem to mind an album that way…
February 21st, 2008 at 10:26 pm
@M,
My post is really to show that when people are exposed to music for free online it results in a sale. The book analogy is I believe spot on - that book has been out for a year with dwindling sales, then it gets exposure, it’s made available for free and then sales erupt….
February 25th, 2008 at 9:22 am
Related, interesting perspective:
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Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business
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http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free