Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Pay What You Want and other urban legends

There’s a discussion going, on a friend’s Facebook profile, about how Pay What You Want (PWYW) offers don’t work in Italy. The punters will simply get the stuff for free, because that is what everybody wants to pay.
Someone comments that PWYW never worked anyway, and brings the example of that Stephen King novel that was released in 2000, and was a total failure.

I am not a Stephen King fan, but I remembered the thing from 2000, the ill-fated serial novel The Plant, so I went and checked a few numbers – and indeed, Stephen King’s PWYW experiment made him a meager 470.000 dollars.
Total failure, right?
The novel was never completed, and that is indeed a failure for a novelist (the rule is “thou shalt finish what thou start”) but the reader response was good: 70/75% of the people that downloaded the installments paid the suggested price of 1 buck or more.
The Pay What You Want model worked.

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She Who Mauls

she who maulsThe story that started its life as The Boy’s Night Out is now available, after a quick editing and some revision, as She Who Mauls, via Gumroad.

The ebook will not be published on Amazon.

I decided to put it up as a Pay What You Want ebook – after all, it was born as a publicity stunt, I’ll keep using it as a publicity vehicle.

You can get the story for free, or set the price you think is right.

Check it out!