I'm going to start with a provocative statement.

There are only three reasons for an Author to provide their books for Free:

1) To get Reviews and/or increase awareness.

2) As part of a promotion strategy to draw attention to other 'Paid' books.

3) Desperation.

The irony is, that in 99% of cases, unless you are already an established Author, none of the above is likely to achieve anything.

A number of recent statistics have indicated that the vast majority of people who download free Ebooks from Indie authors, invariably start to read less than 20% of them, complete less than 5%, and post reviews for less than 1%.

With those kind of odds, Indie Authors have more chance of generating an income by playing the State Lottery!

The very fact that a book is Free, means there is no responsibility or commitment from a perspective reader. The reason why people download Free stuff is because it's Free! In the 'disposable' world we live in, nothing is more disposable than something that is Free.

I doubt anyone would expect someone to spend months, possibly years, producing a product, and then give it away for free - it's business suicide. Yet Authors not only do this, but nowadays, they are actually expected too.

People download Free Ebooks onto their Kindles in the same way they press the 'Like' or 'Share' button on Facebook, and the 'Retweet' button on Twitter.

Just look at the number of books on the average persons 'to read' list here on Goodreads? I've seen people with over 35,000 books on their list, which even if they read a book a day, every day, for the rest of their lives, would still take over 132 years to get through them all?

Ultimately, especially for the vast majority of Indie Authors, Free Books are not the answer in a market which is heavily weighted against them by the financial firepower and resources of the mainstream publishers.

Amazon has undoubtedly given Indie Authors a wonderful and cost effective platform to enable them to bypass the 'traditional' publishing model, but it hasn't leveled the playing field, or made the book market any easier to succeed in.

In fact, it has done exactly the opposite, by quadrupling the number of published authors, it has quadrupled the competition.

Of course, Amazon is the big 600LB bear in the game, and no matter what other platforms Indie authors put their books on, Amazon is the one they need to do well on if they want to stand a chance of earning a 'proper' living.

No Indie author wants to think their books aren't good enough. But if readers aren't prepared to part with $0.99 - or half a cup of Starbucks - for a book, then maybe there's a message there?

Of course, gaining visibility is the hardest part of being an author. There are literally millions of books out there, and each year hundreds of thousands more are added.

Giving your books away for free may seem like a way to get that visibility, and build a fan base, but if you can't convert that into paid sales at some point down the line, then all you are doing is competing in a zero end game.