Too Good to .... Again.

I got an email from a Lisa Davis offering a platform, MyFreeRead.com, where you can post free stories, articles, essays, etc with links to your website, blog, Facebook page, or what have you. You get paid 20 cents every time someone downloads the piece to read and of course you have the nice PR link to other work that may be for sale. How great is this? The pay’s not super, but considering how many people are giving away some of their work in order to get readers to pay for the rest, it’s something anyway. Right?

Being the suspicious person that I am, and lazy to boot (well, when I can get away with it), I checked SFWA’s Writers Beware blog. Sure enough, Victoria Strauss, bless her for the watchdog she is, got the same email and was way ahead of me. This is an advertising gimmick, and a clever one on Mz Davis’s part. You’re just the bait to lure readers who will take an advertising survey if they want to download your piece. And as we all know, marketing information is coin on the internet. So she gets paid much more than 20 cents for that survey. Does it hurt you? Well, readers may be annoyed that they have to do the survey and may decide YOU are behind the obvious information gathering gimmick. I wouldn’t put work up there. She’s not evil (like the fake ‘publishers’ who charge novice writers to publish their books) but she is not being honest, she’s making quite a bit more money from your work than you are, according to the numbers Victoria posted.

Just another bit of proof that if it sounds too good to be true….it is. There ARE nice cooperatives where people pool resources to bring readers to the site, thus helping the members sell their work. Bookview Café is one of these and it’s a very nice one. Start one yourself with some writer friends. Why not put free material up regularly to draw readers who will then be able to find (and buy) more of your work easily? The internet is there and it’s up to us to innovate the New World of Publishing.