I was wondering if it’s good marketing to allow people to lend my eBooks that I create on Kindle? Does it make more people want to buy them, or is it better marketing to not allow lending and let people pay right away.
Answer
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Unless you’re already well-known, allow them to be lent. If you’re a new author, obscurity is a worse problem than piracy (or, more generally, people reading your books without paying you for them).
Look at it from a reader’s perspective. How many authors whom you like have you discovered through the library, or a second-hand shop, or borrowing a book from a friend? How many of those authors have you then gone on to buy books from? If you forbid your books from being lent, you cut out those opportunities for readers to discover you.
That leads on to the next point, which is that if people read your first book for free and like it, they might look for another book by you and be willing to pay for it. So if you don’t have another book yet, start writing one. Very few writers become rich and famous for just one book. How many people had heard of J K Rowling before the second Harry Potter book came out? How many people do you think would have heard of her now if she’d stopped writing after the first one?