Well, it’s the ‘fremium’ model, as the remaining volumes of the epic are paid.
As I said in my main blog just now:
Well, it is a bit depressing for us authors, but the fact is, folk love digital free and hate even a low price, mostly I guess for the convenience of not having to muck about paying a small sum to a faceless internet machine.
So the recent 9 day Free offer for the Girl and the Guardian made a spike in mySmashwords download stats, tailing off a fair bit but plummeting to ZERO downloads the day it went back to 99 cents, until now, 17 days later. 
But now brother John and I are agreed, we will release the Hounds of Free until 31st of December 2012, to sniff out the lost innocents who cannot find their way back into Aeden, and lead them penniless across the threshold into theNine Worlds of the Apples of Aeden, where they will be enriched in spirit and (by the end of volume I) be thankful enough (and hooked enough) to go to the bother of paying for further adventures in II, III and IV (and V, the epilogue, when I write it).
So, it is done. You may now zap over to https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/243499 and download the full volume one complete with colour maps and lexicon, for Zero Money. And if you like it or love it, do write a little review sentence or two and help others know Aeden is out there…
So, for the analytical, here are the graphs from smashwords dashboard -
Last 30 Days of Statistics for The Girl and the Guardian
Page Views
Visits to The Girl and the Guardian page at Smashwords.
Downloads
Downloads of your book in any of the ebook formats it’s available in.
So, 79 free downloaded in 11 days (I thought it was 9… oh well) since uploading the new Volume I. And the paid sales of Volume II on kindle were up – from one last month I think to 2 since the free 11 day period. So now we will see if this 79-to-2 ration is going to be about it – so if we had 7900 free downloads of volume I per month (if!!) then we could get 200 sales of II and ?? of III and IV when they are available… That wouldn’t pay the cost of 12 years of writing in a hurry, but it’d be a heartening start. And the snowballing effect – ‘breakout’ – could well kick in at these levels. But it would take a word of mouth effect – there aren’t that many random stumblers-upon out there to get more than a few downloads by ‘chance’…
watch this space, fellow writers. And do comment if you have some stats on the FREE model.
