Why even sell the book in such a situation?<p>It seems to me that a first release from a casual author with no marketing beyond friends and family has nearly zero chance to even get a single sale. The revenue aspect seems completely moot in such a situation, and effectively what one is doing is throwing the work into a void.<p>On the other hand, I can see how it might seem demeaning to just to give a work away that so much time was spent on, but at least it then has a chance to get maybe a dozen readers or so, especially if you go out and do some casual posting on forums and discussion boards, maybe go to a local book club, that sort of thing. Of course, there's always a slim chance of it going viral out of the blue, and I suppose that's one reason to attach a price to the work, but to me it seems like the virality chance is indistinguishable from zero if it's just tossed out there with a paywall among millions of other hobbyist books, While if there's a lower barrier to entry, that chance probably goes up at least an order of magnitude. In the infinitely small chance that it does go viral, it would be pretty easy to transition to a Patreon and put a price tag on the second work too.<p>I occasionally read these stories about authors working so hard and getting no one even reading their stuff, and it just seems so grim to me, even after accounting for the "make lemonade out of lemons" state of mind that OP has.