For his next col­lec­tion of short sto­ries to be pub­lished, titled With a Lit­tle Help, author and blogger-extraordinaire Cory Doc­torow will be run­ning an exper­i­ment so that he can see whether his strat­egy of offer­ing his work for free is work­ing.

With prices to range from $0.00 to $10,000 for var­i­ous pack­ages, Doc­torow is to track his finan­cial progress and the progress of the exper­i­ment as a whole on his new col­umn at Pub­lish­ers Weekly.

This first col­umn looks at how he will be mak­ing money (his mar­ket­ing and pub­lic­ity strat­egy will be cov­ered soon, too):

  • E-book: free, in a wide vari­ety of formats
  • Audio­book: free, in a wide vari­ety of formats
  • Dona­tions: what­ever happens
  • Print-on-Demand trade paper­back: $16 (approx­i­mately; price TBD)
  • Pre­mium hard­cover edi­tion: $250, lim­ited run of 250 copies
  • Com­mis­sion a new story: $10,000 (one only)
  • Adver­tise­ments: TBD
  • Dona­tions of books: TBD

That’s how the money is going to come in. To be hon­est, I have no idea how much money that will be ($10,000 has already come in, of course). But I do know what I’ll do about it. I’m going to dis­close it, all of it, every month, in a run­ning tally in a monthly col­umn here in Pub­lish­ers Weekly. And inci­den­tally, this arti­cle is gross­ing me all of $900, less my agent’s 15% com­mis­sion, and the columns $400 here­after. I will then put this into an appen­dix, which will be added to new edi­tions of the book and com­pared to the rev­enues from Over­clocked. That’s as close to an apples-to-apples com­par­i­son as I can come up with, but I think it will speak well to the ques­tion: what’s the best a writer like me can do on his own, ver­sus with a tra­di­tional pub­lisher for whom he does every­thing he can to aid in book sales?

via Mar­ginal Revolution