Thanks for bringing up an important issue.

I am the author of World Wide Rave. With all due respect to Wiley, my publisher, the statement made at BEA last year was just plain wrong. And to be honest, it makes me insane with rage at how wrong it is.

The answer to this question depends on who you are. The Wiley manager in charge of digital content may think the strategy did not work because they made a few thousand less dollars in sales.

But for me as a brand, free is wildly successful.

I also give away free short ebooks that collectively have over 2 million downloads. Many people read the free ebooks first and then buy the print books and also hire me to speak.

I am on the top of the search results for many important terms which drives people to my books. (Type “Viral Marketing” into Google and you will see what I mean because my ebook comes up on the first page). Here are my free ebooks http://www.davidmeermanscott.com/products_ebooks.htm

The month that I was promoting World Wide Rave through the free offer that Wiley dismissed, I got tremendous buzz by giving stuff away. And that month was the first that my prior book “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” hit the BusinessWeek bestseller list. It remained on the list for six months and would still be there if BusienssWeek was continuing the list. That book is the number one marketing and PR book in the world, published in 24 languages.

So Wiley benefited from free because I became a much better known author and sold more books. I benefited too because I generated many additional speaking gigs.

If you look at this from the tiny little narrow lens of how many books were sold on Kindle it is a “failure” but if you look at it from the big picture of how it promotes an author to the world it is a raging success.

David Meerman Scott