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Blogs by Alan Cook
Free Books 4/2/2015 12:26:03 PM
Why would an author give away a book? Here are a couple of answers. Why would an author give away his book? Aren’t all authors writing to make money? I’ve wondered about this for a long time after seeing the number of books that are available free as e-books. I’ve come up with a couple of reasons.
The first reason is why I’m giving away my book, Freedom’s Light: Quotations from History’s Champions of Freedom. I think everybody should be aware of its contents, especially young people. The book contains quotations by historical figures about personal freedom. On a daily basis we don’t think much about our freedom, even though we may be losing it “…an inch at a time.” As Dr. Walter Williams says. The people quoted, including Aristotle, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Anne Frank and Martin Luther King, knew what they were talking about. We need to be aware of what governments throughout the world are doing to our freedom before it is gone.
The second reason I came up with for giving away a book is that it can be a good promotional device, especially when you’ve written a lot of books as I have. If you like a book you get free, you may be tempted to read more books by the same author. I picked Aces and Knaves to give away because it’s a standalone mystery written in a breezy style, that people have said is fun to read. It’s about gambling and other hijinks, and takes place in Los Angeles and San Francisco. There’s a murder to solve, the characters are likeable (well, some are more likeable than others) and there’s some potentially romantic stuff as well.
