Should Book Authors Pursue a Patronage Model? 342
blarkon writes "With ebook prices falling and some readers even unwilling to pay more than 99 cents for an ebook, some authors are starting to consider a move back to the patronage model that was successful in providing them with a living before the widespread use of copyright. Might such a model work or are the days where a midlist author can make a living off their work a relic of the 20th century?"
Don't worry writers (Score:1, Interesting)
In a few years, this AI I'm working on will put you out of business. You'll be able to give it a subject and length, and it'll write you a story about it.
We moved on for a reason (Score:4, Interesting)
With ebook prices falling and some readers even unwilling to pay more than 99 cents for an ebook
A lot of ebooks aren't worth even $0.99. Same with a lot of printed books. Most books are simply not going to sell well and won't command much of a price.
some authors are starting to consider a move back to the patronage model that was successful in providing them with a living before the widespread use of copyright.
Never been anything stopping them aside from finding a patron. Of course patrons usually tend to sponsor people with, you know, actual talent. Just because you want to be an author doesn't mean you automatically deserve to make your living doing it.
Cultural Tyranny (Score:3, Interesting)
Patronage was cultural tyranny in which those with money controlled what was produced and made sure that it was to their tastes rather than the creator's vision and that the political implications lined up with their (ruling class) interests.
Re:1 million downloads @ 99c is still 990,000 doll (Score:5, Interesting)
"Streaming" model would be nice (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know how that would work on the back end for compensating authors, but as a consumer I'd love it.
Re:Cultural Tyranny (Score:4, Interesting)
As opposed to what exactly? Our current system. Art seems to be even more watered down when you're trying to cater to thousands of people for their patronage, instead of a single one.
Re:Cultural Tyranny (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah. The meaning of "Patronage" has been broadened a lot by both technology and the structure of modern society. Technology made mass production cheap, and digital technology allows a lot of small transactions spread over a huge geographical area. Society provides the combination of a high literacy rate and low poverty rate - so there's a huge customer base for books across all socio-economic classes.
The ideal form, in my opinion, is that your patron can be a large group: 30,000 fans of your previous works each give you a dollar to fund your next work. You own the copyright on it, you publish it as an ebook, and the donors get it for a dollar less than everyone else. No one at any step of this process needs to be rich or powerful.
The old form was a single-patron model. Sometimes you didn't get the copyright. Sometimes the work wasn't even for general publication, just a private piece of art for Lord Richguy's gallery.
I think the logistics prevent the rich from taking over a distributed patronage model. They can't buy out all the good authors, and the authors probably wouldn't consent to being bought anyway. They can't make the rest of society buy only their rich-sponsored books and shun the other books. And it doesn't eliminate existing models either - publishers and arts foundations will still support the things that raw popularity won't.
Re:No. That's dumb. (Score:3, Interesting)
Publishers charge more for the electronic versions under the assumption that they are more likely to be pirated (in spite of any DRM), and thus reduce sales. Whether this is or is not a legitimate concern is debatable, but it's certainly understandable.
Further, it makes no sense to price the electronic edition of a book cheaper than the paper copies. Those print copies are a sunk cost that needs to be recovered, and setting a cheaper copy on the electronic edition would cannibalize those crucial sales, causing more of those copies to be remaindered at a loss. Thus, the only way a publisher can guarantee that they won't lose money is to charge as much for the electronic copy as the printing cost of the print copy plus the author's royalty plus the channel cost for the electronic copy plus their normal profit for a print copy. There's a good chance that when you total that up, it ends up being more than the cost of a print copy.
Most of us do. The question is not whether an author should have a second job; that's almost inevitable. The question is whether the time spent writing even provides enough payback to be worth doing at all. Given that an average eBook reportedly sells about 10,000 copies, at a buck apiece, you'll earn about $3,300 in royalties, or about half the average advance on a printed book. It's peanuts.
So you'd put in the equivalent of 9–12 months of full-time work—say 1,500–2,000 hours—and make $3,300, or about $1.65–2.20 per hour. You'd make more money as an illegal immigrant doing yard work for cash under the table. You'd be so far down on the pay scale that there are people working at factories in third world countries that would make almost as much money as you do. To suggest that authors should sell their works for so little money is downright patronizing.
Re:Cultural Tyranny -- Advance Payments (Score:5, Interesting)
What many people don't realize is what is called an "advance" is not a payment to the author in advance of future sales of a book, it is a loan against future sales of a book. And often it is a loan at a fairly high percentage rate. Most publishing houses only run (e.g. "print") a book for about three years. If the sales for a given book haven't been as good as projected, it is entirely possible for the author to actually owe the publisher money at the end of the run.
Where did you get this idea? Neither I nor any writer I know has ever signed a contract that specified repayment on a portion of the advance. If the book doesn't "earn out," the publisher writes off the remaining portion of the advance as a loss, and that's it. Maybe it works this way in some publishing niches, I don't know, but it's by no means standard. Such awful terms are common in the music industry, I understand, but not in publishing.
Re:Competition (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, I'm hearing more and more about big publisher picking up self-publishing authors. The $0.99 model seems to work well as a form of introduction. In many ways, it's comparable to musicians giving away their music on the web and/or facebook to get attention. I've even seen advice to the effect of, "get a couple of books out there, sell at least five thousand copies of each, and then go find an agent."
My kindle sales tripled when I dropped the price of my book to $0.99. I'm not making any money, but people are reading my book (most authors will say that's all they really want, although it is true that food is nice from time to time). If I'm lucky (and if I've done my job), my book might snowball. Or it will generate enough interest to attract the attention of someone important. At the very least, I'll have a few more readers lined up for when I release my second book this spring.
There may not be much of a reach for the $0.99 market, but it's a start. And most people won't balk at risking dollar, and won't feel like they're wasting their time if they only read a few pages of it. A lot of folks pass out a dollar to just some random homeless person on the street.
Brett James, author of The Deadfall Project ( thedeadfallproject.com )
Re:1 million downloads @ 99c is still 990,000 doll (Score:4, Interesting)
As the population grows the demand for variety doesn't grow. So 30 people billion people still only read 4 books a year. The vast majority of the 4 books are going to have a lot of cross over.
It's just like the app store model. 99% of all downloads are 15 or fewer different applications. But since 15 application developers get 99% of the sales the price pressure is extreme to the point that consumers expect a $1 price point (makes sense when most of the apps serve an extremely broad audience like angry birds).
So if you make it, you're golden. If you aren't the top 0.1% of creators then your market has been scorched barren.
The problem then becomes that it becomes more and more difficult to unseat the established players or foster new content. The gulf between rolling in caviar and destitute has no bridge and no middle ground. The best way survive then is through diversification. If only 0.1% survive then you hire 1,000 people and pay all of them in hopes that the one winner will subsidize all of the failures.
For novel authors this isn't a particularly new phenomenon. Books are such a low volume industry that it's really really hard for more than a handful of books to be successful every year (unlike say music in which people consume hundreds or thousands of different products a year). But previously authors had alternative jobs to subsidize their hobby writing such as news papers and magazines. But those are also consolidating now into fewer and fewer outlets of creation.
Sure the population has doubled in the US, but the number of journalists has probably halved. The number of journalists needed per person will continue to reduce as the need for local correspondences diminishes. Just because your readership has doubled doesn't mean you need twice as many journalists to cover an event for example.
Re:What is "making a living" (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe if nobody is willing to pay for your book it just isn't good enough. Is that such a complex concept?
Read the article. There is the concept of the "anchoring price" which is what people think is a "fair" price. The interesting point is that if the price to produce the product is higher than the anchoring price, the market dies. Even more interesting, is that anchoring price can be quite different from the price that the customer would be willing to pay in the absence of that price. (By the way, it works in both directions. You can get people to pay 2-3 times what they would otherwise pay in the absence of an anchor price, and likewise you can get them to refuse to pay 1/10th of what they would otherwise be willing to pay by setting the anchoring price too low (like free).
This is where the laws of economics, which dictate prices should rise because people want the product, get defeated by the psychology of humans which says, "if the price is higher than the anchor price in my head, I won't buy it even if I would have enjoyed it at a higher price."
There are reams published about how psychology can prevent a transaction in which both sides would be better off, just because of external factors.
So, no, people may *not* be willing to pay for your book, even if they it's good enough - welcome to human beings.
And yes, sorry, reality *is* a complex concept :-)
Thoughts From the Inside (Score:4, Interesting)
Many people have commented on the fact that for 99, one can by an awful lot of crap on the ebook market. Yeah, there are some pretty awful books out there. Fortunately, most of the sales channels for ebooks allow a reader to download a sample of the book to read (the first chapter or two) so the reader can judge whether or not a given book is worth their hard-earned money. I've come across quite a few that were so terrible, I could barely get past the first paragraph before I was compelled to delete it from my Nook. The spelling and grammatical mistakes were just too much to take!
You wonder, "How does Apple/Amazon/Barnes&Noble let this crap on their servers?!"
The answer, "Because it cost them nothing." All they did was make the shelf space available. It is up to the writer to put their book there and to go out and promote their book so it sells. All the ebook markets make their money by exacting a commission from each sale (30%). If the book is really terrible, then the author has an uphill battle to fight getting any kind of meaningful sales. If the book is terrific, then sales will skyrocket once word gets out among readers that it is a good read. If you as a reader are willing to sift through a lot of crap, there are some incredible gems to be found for 99!
The Patronage model of supporting an author (or any artist, really) doesn't really work today. There are incredibly few rich individuals today who are willing for fork over money to support some random "deadbeat artist" to create some kind of artistic work. The MacArthur Foundation's Fellows Program (aka "The Genius Award") only gives out money to an average of 30 people each year to pursue their work. On average, there are 30,000 people in America alone each day trying to submit the next great novel. That disparity of numbers pretty well demonstrates the Patronage model will never work today. I would dearly love for the McArthur Foundation to hand me a check and say, "Here, this ought to tide you over until you finish your book." But I know that's not going to happen. I am far more likely to win one of the big multi-state lotteries here in the US than to have someone I know hand the manuscript of my book to the McArthur Foundation's secret recommendation panel.
Getting published by a traditional publisher certainly has better odds of happening. The readers benefit by the publisher filtering out the crap and the publisher benefits by a literary agent filtering out the crap. So a writer today has to breach two barriers to getting published by convincing and agent to review and promote their work or being luckier still by finding an editor at a publisher that is willing to review their work. A publisher brings a lot of services to the use of the author such as professional editing, marketing and promotion, typographic services and printing and--of course, that big money maker--distribution. If a publisher is really excited about an author's work, they'll offer a pretty large sum of money for the rights to the book, as well as any follow up books. If they are not so enthused about a book but still think it can sell, they might offer a budding author an advance that the author can pay back out of the sales of the book.
Self-publishing has a very bad stigma in the writing profession. As little as twenty years ago, self-publishing (aka "Vanity Publishing") was pretty much the only recourse for really bad writers. Writers whose books were so bad, they had to pay a printer to get their books published. The articles cited by the O.P., seem to come from this camp. They are so sure that the flood of so many author-wannabes are going to overwhelm the book market with so much crap, that readers will completely throw up their hands in disgust and completely abandon the self-published e-author and the whole writing industry is going to completely collapse.
If a friend told you that they just read a new book, enjoyed it, and recommended you try it, would you? That's how most books get sold. That is how I came to like a "little-kn