I’m looking for answers to the question: What’s the best way to distribute a free ebook?
As a side note.. getting it out free is sightly harder. The big guns in distribution, your Amazons etc don’t want to play ball. Or am I wrong.
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Write a web page for it – you can create a free site at sites.google.com
Torrent it out through the Pirate Bay
Post it in alt.binaries.ebooks.fantasy in USENET
I remember that the first time I ever heard of StarShipSofa was when Boing Boing announced that collected stories volume 1 was available as a free download.
What did you do then?
publish in pdf.
see The Soundproof Escape Pod
Seconding the suggestion to look to the Soundproof Escape Pod as an example.
Some authors host files on their sites for free ebooks, available to be downloaded.
Why limit your readers,rtf, HTML, .epub, .mobi, Sony, Microsoft , and ebookwise formats.
The question then becomes hosting capacity, and/or download volume, and that will be question of how popular you become and how prolific you write.
Actually, I think you should limit the format even further. I would suggest ePub (covers Sony, B&N Nook, Kobo, and many others ) and MOBI (covers Kindle ). There are also software apps for both formats for PC, Mac, iOS and Android. There is no real need to cover any other format.
Check out EscapePod & Redstone for ideas on presentation, though I disagree with both site’s choice of PDF as one of the formats. PDF is NOT and ebook format and is rarely readable on anything other than a print out or desktop monitor.
Check out MobileRead ( http://www.mobileread.com/ ) for a lot of good info on creating and distributing ebooks. There’s excellent support for Calibre and Sigil, two excellent free tools for ebook production, at MobileRead along with discussions of other production software, reading apps, and devices.