Almost a year ago I wrote a post titled "Free is the new black" about how savvy companies are giving away content on the Web -- and finding alternative ways to monetize their content. This model is now spreading to an industry near and dear to my heart: the publishing industry. And it's turning the old models of selling books upside down.

Also about a year ago, I cowrote a book with Randy Ingermanson: Writing Fiction For Dummies. This week our publisher -- John Wiley & Sons -- tried an experiment with our book. Instead of selling the Kindle version for the usual price of $9.99, we've dropped the price this week to exactly $0 -- free, no charge. Now, why would we do that? Reason #1 is that we are pretty sure it will dramatically increase recognition of our book in the marketplace. Giving away the electronic version of our book for free is a kind of PR -- it is our hope that the hundreds of people who get it for free will tell their friends what a great book it is, and they will also want to get it. Reason #2 is that we expect that giving away the Kindle version of Writing Fiction For Dummies will buoy sales of the hard copy version of the book. We have seen this effect occur with other free Kindle books. When you give away the Kindle version, sales of the hard copy version increase.

So, what have been the results?

To start, when Randy sent out word to his opt-in email list of more than 20,000 people, the buzz about the book spread like wildfire. The Twittersphere went NUTS -- for several days, hundreds of tweets were sent out to thousands of followers. And when news of the free Kindle version of Writing Fiction For Dummies hit bargain website DealNews (which made it an Editor's Choice), the book shifted into overdrive. Every other bargain website picked up the news about our book from DealNews, and word spread far and wide. Writing Fiction For Dummies quickly rose to the #3 position on Amazon's free Kindle book top-100 list. And not only were gobs of publicity generated for our book, sales of the hardcopy version of Writing Fiction For Dummies jumped on Amazon.com, and they have remained strong all week long. While we won't know the long-term impact on our book for weeks or months, we are hopeful that we will continue to sell more books than usual as a result of our experiment.

So, if you haven't yet figured out how to give away something to your customers and prospective customers for free, you should explore the possibilities. Believe me -- there are a lot of different ways to make money. Including giving away your products for free.

Oh. And if you haven't picked up a free copy of Writing Fiction For Dummies, it's not too late. You've got until 12 midnight Pacific Time, on Friday, November 19th.