Marketing your Product: My tip for Electronic Publishing

here's a popular author's views on the topic.

While I don't grab pdfs of anything I would like to pass on a thought.

It may be true that you are losing some small bit of revenue to those 27 or so that grab your content from [site]. Now you do have a limited distribution, but as you may see your material free on [site] and tons of others as electronic media as our friend already pointed out, I still find myself purchasing hard copy content from my local gaming store especially if I want it passed around the table.

In addition gamers may not read too many reviews but when a game master pulls out good third party content for his game it sparks the most valuable of advertising. Word of Mouth.

Gamers are notoriously frugal with their funds. It was stated by opponents of file sharing "The point of concern is the fact that the vast majority of people that steal products never pay for them." I would be surprised if any of the people that steal from the site would have ever touched the product in the first place, so that wasn't actually revenue they could say they would have gotten . . . ever.

I know of one person who pulled content for free, a game that was on the Torrents prior to it's publication , you know what happened? He demonstrated the product to folks didn't know it, this helped sell the product to folks whom, without the demo, may have never purchased the product.

Indeed since then I have 7 physical copies of various versions (of the same book) none of which were stolen, which mean that the revenue was realized the electronic media that I "stole". My buying habits completely negate the cost of me having the electric media content as well as at least 2-3 times the expected revenue from a single consumer.

Think of it this way. For every 1 person that has no qualms about grabbing free content there are roughly 8 others that they expose who will be interested to pay for a legal version of the media because they do have issues (it is illegal). If the media you produce in anyway stands out against the illegal copies (adding functionality in the electronic media, easy to use, navigation tools for a digital product) then that number would actually grow likely by a factor of 10 or more. (because what you sell is that much better than the free version). If it's good then it rockets and you will have no idea what to do with yourself (we can all hope).

But you really need to do nothing than expose the product to see a realization in revenue.

If you were get upset and then ask someone to pull the illegal product down. He does, and your third party content competitor doesn't. Whose product get's seen?

Whose product get's sold?

-Joshua