Many of you have taken advantage of the 3 free books I give away on this website. Since I’ve started doing it the number of subscribers has gone up consistently.

Today I’m going to teach you how to get your own free books that you can give away. This is a great technique to generate leads in any business, whether it is subscribers to a blog, or just to get email addresses of people who may be interested in your product.

Some people have asked, “How are you able to give them away?”

The answer is that these books are either in the “public domain”, which means the copyright has expired, or they are under the “creative commons” license, which means you have some freedom to use them.

One of the best places I’ve found to get these types of books is Scribd.com.

Supposedly they are one of the top 300 sites on the internet (that no one has heard of), receive 20 million visitors a month, and have 17 billion words in their “library” of uploaded documents.

I suggest you take some time to browse their site and see what pieces of content might be useful in your niche. They have other types of content besides books as well, such as sheet music, art, slides, and essays.

What material can I give away for free?

Copyrighted material is the strictest: you can’t use it without paying. Public domain works are the most open: you can do whatever you want. Creative commons is somewhere in the middle.

As you browse the different documents on Scribd you will see little icons that tell you what the copyright situation is. Here is what each one means (it can get a little tricky):

Public Domain

Public domain works are the most wide open. You can download them right off Scribd and distribute them on your own website. You can even edit them however you want and sell them.

According to Wikipedia:

In the United States, all books and other works published before 1923 have expired copyrights and are in the public domain. In addition, works published before 1964 that did not have their copyrights renewed 28 years after first publication year also are in the public domain…

The Creative Commons License

The next four are all more specific versions of the creative commons license. Under all of them you can still give the book away for free.

Attribution

This means you need to give credit to the original person who created the document. Most commonly, by leaving their name or website intact inside the work to show they were the original author.

You can still do whatever else you want with it though, including giving it away, selling it, or editing it.

Non-Commercial

This means you can still give it away for free, you just can’t sell it.

No Derivatives

This means you can only give away verbatim copies of the work. You can’t edit it.

Keep Same License

You can make derivative works (edited copies) but they must be distributed under the same creative commons license that the original used.

Conclusion

You can read more about the creative commons license here, but as you can see, under any of the creative common licenses you can still give the book away for free (which was my main goal). Just keep the author’s name in there and don’t edit it and you should be fine.

I don’t really recommend trying to sell public domain or creative common works (although some people do this). Instead, give them away for free to generate leads.

There really are some great books out there. I read and paid good money for both Think and Grow Rich and The Richest Man In Babylon when I bought them in paperback years before this website. It wasn’t until much later that I realized they were available to distribute for free.

So there you have it. Go to Scribd.com and check out some free material that your potential customers might really like. Then give it away to them in exchange for their email address to build leads for your business.

Most people don’t buy anything the first time they come to your site, and if they leave you will never hear from them again. But if you give them some instant value in exchange for their email, now you can follow up with them at some point down the road to build trust and a real business relationship.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

Want to get 3 of the top 10 books ever written on building wealth for FREE? Think and Grow Rich, The Richest Man In Babylon, and The Way To Wealth are yours for free when you subscribe to get updates from StartBreakingFree.com!