At the risk of Sounding Mercenary (Pixel etc)

I'm going to go into some of my reasoning for why I think this is a good time for me to give away some stories, and they're mostly business driven.

I personally am planning on putting up a couple of short stories that I've already sold elsewhere, so it is work that I've been paid for. I'm also planning on holding onto the rights, so they will still be eligible for paid reprints at a later date.

I'm doing this because I'm confident that I'm a good enough writer that at least a few people who read the free stuff will be motivated to go and buy my book-which would have the effect of paying me for posting the stories. It's not quite a reprint fee, but it has the same effect.

Will that really happen? I don't know.

Will I even know if it does? Probably not.

On the risk side, the main thing that most writers worry about are piracy issues. I understand the worry, but I'm going to go ahead and trust my readers.

It's an experiment. For me it feels like a low degree of risk for a reasonable payoff. That's not going to be the case for everyone.