I signed up for Smashwords' End of Year sale, going on for the rest of December. They let authors choose their discount they want to offer. I chose to make all my books free. My husband thinks this is crazy, and I get that. I work for months to write, edit, set up, and publish a book, and then I give it away. It does sound a little odd. But here's the thing. Independent authors have very little power in the book market. When I was traditionally published, they had full-time people who saw that every library in the US saw my book offered for sale. They arranged for my books to be reviewed at prestigious sites. They arranged for blurbs from fellow authors (in exchange for blurbs from me. That's how it's done). In other words, there was a big machine behind every book I published back then. People heard about it. People read the books and wrote about them. Booksellers got notified: "Hey, Peg Herring has a new book coming out!" Independent writers g...