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?"
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.
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(SCNR)
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It's easier to make a living as a Navy SEAL or Olympic gymnast right now that it is as a writer. There are only some 300 full time authors out there, these are people who do nothing but write novels for a living with no side jobs, teaching jobs etc. Writers get shafted on what they earn. Unless you are JK Rowling or Stephen King of course.
The publishers take it all. Every penny. It's far worse in the publishing world than in the music world. At least a musician can make money playing venues.
Check out Open Design (Score:5, Informative)
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:Cultural Tyranny (Score:4, Insightful)
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That really hasn't changed. If you can convince a publisher to grant you and advance on the book, it greatly increases the amount of time that most folks have to revise their books. Under the old system they'd be paid before and during the initial draft, whereas now you put in that work for free hoping to be paid. Under the old system they might cut you off, but you'd been paid up until that point and it was roughly equivalent to being fired.
Sure, they had more control over what you produced, but under the
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: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:4, Insightful)
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.
Pop culture is tyranny too, one in which the lowest common denominator determines what crud is dumped onto the masses. Every system has its downside.
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Ummmm... no it isn't. Although there are 20 Just Bieber stories for every story I want to read about, the fact is that i have a choice. A patronage model is quite different from what we have today.
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Ummmm... no it isn't. Although there are 20 Just Bieber stories for every story I want to read about, the fact is that i have a choice. A patronage model is quite different from what we have today.
What we have now is a model where a handful of big music companies are the "patrons." The Biebers of the world are hand picked, groomed and styled to fit whatever they're pushing this year. Of course manufactured music isn't new, it goes all the way back to Tinpan Alley, but we've pretty much perfected it [youtube.com]. The dumping of that stuff on the market by the companies that control most of the retail space, airtime, etc certainly does kill choice.
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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.
Exactly.
But then, so is the publishing house model we have today. Its not really a lot different.
Both the big ebook markets, Amazon and Barnes and Noble have built self publish programs, as do a number of lesser known sites.
These open the flood gates to a large number of authors. Some are good, some are atrocious. The world has quite enough trashy romance novels if you ask me, but it seems like every 30 something female has yet another to offer.
But the key is no one is standing as gate keeper between the
Re:Cultural Tyranny (Score:4, Insightful)
OP rants against the archaic and irrelevant definition of patronage, which may be why he was modded down. Today, with paypal, and a website as a platform, anyone can seek patronage from anyone else. Look at Minecraft for example, it was mostly funded by people who bought an author's promise of a future product. In this modern world where access to ideas and the means to fund them is freer than any moment in history, using cultural tyranny to describe the patronage model is rather ignorant.
You are ignorant (Score:2)
TFA addresses what you raise, only the popular products will be funded by things like kickstarter. The slick, good looking and easy to digest. Some think that other works that do not have an easy appeal also deserve funding. That is hard to do when all funding is obtained through an idols like method of a popularity contest.
Patronage of any kind always means that what gets produced is what the person paying for it wants to be produced. He who pays the piper, decides the tune.
That you mention paypal shows ho
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Some think that other works that do not have an easy appeal also deserve funding. That is hard to do when all funding is obtained through an idols like method of a popularity contest.
Of course, in traditional publishing and copyright, only popular books make money, which means that publishers that care about money only want to publish books which will be popular. Some publishers don't care about money so much, but they're essentially like the patrons of old.
I really don't see how you would go about making a significant amount of money from a book that was not popular, unless you forced people to buy it, or forced people to pay unpopular authors via the tax system, both of which sound a
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Sorry, but this is Slashdot. If you dare suggest people aren't entitled to get all the entertainment they want for free, you're automatically considered a troll.
Competition (Score:4, Insightful)
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Cream rises to the top in any market.
Release a few books for free.
You build a following.
Don't quit your day job just yet, the market is big enough that anything well written will eventually get attention.
The promise of promotion is all the big publishing houses have left to offer. It may be a short-cut to popularity, but
the price is very very high.
Re:Competition (Score:4, Informative)
I agree. The best horror novel ever written may be sitting on Amazon as an ebook for $0.99 right now. I'll never know, though, because it's a lot easier to just buy the next King book.
This is exactly why the big publishing houses still hold value for both the commercial writer and the reader. For the writer, it's the marketing, patronage (read: advances), and other benefits. For the reader, it's the filtering. Because someone has to actually take a chance on the work other than the author, there is a much better signal-to-noise ratio. And since there is a bigger audience word-of-mouth works better, there are more reviews, and etc.
Also, and this is a bit off topic but it should be said: anyone serious about making money off their work should probably stay away from self-publishing. Not only do you have all the disadvantages talked about above, but if you self-published the big publishing houses will not touch you.
Re:Competition (Score:4, Informative)
Also, and this is a bit off topic but it should be said: anyone serious about making money off their work should probably stay away from self-publishing. Not only do you have all the disadvantages talked about above, but if you self-published the big publishing houses will not touch you.
This advice is a few years out of date. Just ask Amanda Hocking. Or Larry Correia. Or John Scalzi. You just have to be good.
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I'll give you that it helps to be good at self-publishing, but that really isn't all that difficult. Most people capable of writing a readable novel are capable of learning how to self-publish. And it's getting easier all the time -- wouldn't surprise me if a year or two from now MS Word and Open/Libre Office have options to "export as e-book". (Yeah, there's still covers and such -- and a growing sub-industry among artists who do covers.)
The only real question is whether the volume of a lower price poin
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> if you self-published the big publishing houses will not touch you.
I have to say that that is no longer true. Big houses are now looking at self-published successes (the very, very few) and offering contracts. Hard to believe, but true.
However, if you've managed to make it as a self-published author, the mathematics is such that you may well make more money as a self-published author.
It should be emphasized, though, that if you haven't already got a fan base, the odds of making a big success (able to
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It would be great to have a system to help finding books, but I'd pass anything that relied on tags I enter.
If I knew what I'd want on a book, I'd write it myself.
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That is why someone needs to innovate a good system of finding books that will interest you.
I am thinking of some kind of genre-tagging and element-tagging system with publisher tags, and also community tags/ratings, and some good search tools to wade through it all.
So people can search for murder mysteries that include horses and an aristocratic prose. Or romance stories with low violence and only heterosexual encounters. Or whatever combinations people seem to care about.
Possibly also an automated system to evaluate the quality of the writing style. Back in the '80s I used an e-mail system that would evaluate what grade level your e-mail was written to. Something similar to weed out the chaff would be useful to the consumer. (And sadly enough, my boss preferred 6th grade level versus 13th or above).
Yes, or No, or Use a Mixed Model (Score:2)
Certainly more than one author has put Kickstarter.com into use to provide enough funding to pay for them to write and publish a work (books, graphic novels, movies, shorts, etc.). Many of these creators have also charged for the work either as an ebook or traditional print copies. One can also choose both. There is the custom group patronage route as well, where an author like Stephen King requires some amount of donations be contributed in advance and then releases the next chapter as a free work online.
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The barrier to entry for writing a novel is stunningly low. Anyone can do it. Look at NaNoWriMo next month to see what I mean. Anyone who funds a writer through kickstarter is an idiot. The average, old school publishe
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Arguably very few novels turn a profit. Writers write them when they get home from their real job, pouring their heart and soul, but more importantly their time into writing. Working a second job at McDs would generate a greater overall profit than writing. They do it because they enjoy it.
Most novels published by traditional publishers do make a profit, although that profit does not necessarily make its way to the author.
The barrier to entry for writing a novel is stunningly low. Anyone can do it. Look at NaNoWriMo next month to see what I mean.
The barrier to entry has traditionally been high in that most submissions were not accepted by mainstream publishers, never made it into mainstream stores, and were almost completely unavailable to the general public. The move to e-books has lowered that barrier so there are a lor more entrants into the market that the average buyer can choose from. This is still in transiti
Why does a book have to be valuable to everyone? (Score:2)
There are plenty of books I wouldn't pay $0.99 to read. The fact is, there are millions of books I wouldn't read for any price...my time has value, and if I'm not interested in reading a book, I'm simply not going to read it. But that doesn't mean that these books aren't worth the price for someone who *does* want to read them. The author's job in that case is to try to appeal to a wide enough audience to make writing the book worthwhile...or patronage is sufficient if you can find it. Plenty of artists
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That's a good argument that the $1 book is a bad idea in the first place. If a book is worth spending time reading, it's worth paying more than $1. The problem is you don't know until after you pay. A solution would be to make the first chapter free and the full book $5.
In volume, 99 cents is enough (Score:3)
Academia (Score:2)
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Interestingly, neal stephenson makes the distinction between "beowulf" writters and "dante" writters. He explained that difference here, on a slashdot interview. That interview and in particular the answer 2 changed the way I see the difference between commercial authors and "intellectual authors" or even between academic researcher and R&D researcher.
http://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-responds-with-wit-and-humor [slashdot.org]
"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.
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I think it would work pretty well on the back end... especially for the authors who write better literature.
I'm believer in the kind of system where each item accrues points without a ceiling. Then at the end of a period you sum all the points up and divide up the profits up according to the portions of points. If the reader software has a "Like" button, then a book can get a point for each "like" that's it's been awarded. Fraud could be reduced by giving readers unique ID's so that each reader can only
Personally I pay for work (Score:2)
When its of value. If its crap, then i feel i was cheated. In these 'entertainment' fields you get no warranty and have go to on faith alone.
anything for an extra 15% (Score:2)
Fewer gatekeepers is always a good thing.
99 cents is fine, if the author gets all of it (Score:3)
On most traditionally published paper books, the author gets only a very small percentage of the retail price. That makes some sense. A bunch of people need to get paid: acquisitions editor, copy editor, truck driver, checkout clerk... The publisher is also taking a financial risk by publishing the book, and a small number of very profitable books are subsidizing the much larger number of relatively unprofitable or completely unprofitable ones.
But how does it make sense for Amazon to take 65 cents on the sale of a 99-cent book? Amazon has basically zero cost to recoup. OK, they take a loss on the kindle right now in order to get people locked into their system. But it's kind of pathetic if this ends up being a permanent arrangement and they manage to levy a 65-cent tax until the end of time. Most book authors would actually be pretty happy with a 99-cent price -- if they got all of it.
If someone isn't willing to pay $0.99 for your (Score:2)
IMHO Kickstarter is the new patronage model (Score:2)
What is "making a living" (Score:3, Insightful)
Terry Pratchett is probably well known on Slashdot and reasonably harmless, few would have an issue with him. He writes enjoyable books and makes a great deal of money with them. Is someone who can donate a million at the drop of a hat, just making a living?
The US has something called the working poor. People with a full time job, sometimes even two, who still can't make ends meet. Somehow it is then hard to care for a brit who writes books in the evening hours after his day job of being a spokes person for a nuclear power plant. He wouldn't have gone hungry would he?
Lets face it, most authors are only poor if they aren't any good at all and can't hold a decent day job or they insist on suffering for their art OR just plain suck at life and think that because they think they got a great book inside them, the world owes them NOT just a living but a rich living.
I notice TFA is in response to that flood of text about the death of the creative class, which I stopped reading after the line where video store clerks are apparently creative... I thought the creative class was programmers and artists, not store clerks.
As I am getting older I am getting more and more opposed to art and the leeching it brings with it. In Holland we give a lot of tax payers money to artists who then insist on more and more control over what they were payed to create... I have a very simple solution for all artists. Either ZERO government grants OR total control. Not both. The infighting should solve the problem, no artists left... and then what? And then NOTHING. People have ALWAYS created art, you often have to hit them quite hard to stop doing it. If art can come out of the darkest concentration camps it cannot be killed. Granted, this is NOT the art most unpopular artists approve off, a toilet nailed to a wall with an claimed price of 3 million but no actual bidders let alone buyers. That kind of art survives purely on patronage, not by art lovers but by people who want to be seen as art lovers through spending other peoples money on it.
The world is changing, once if you wanted to write you had to spend ages at it and then you had one book. Any copies took years! Then the printing press changed and made books cheap to buy BUT also far far cheaper to write. Without the printing press, without tech, many books would never have been written. Not least because many would have been unable to write or read in the first place.
Now the internet allows people to write far more, almost anyone can publish content. Salon.com would never have the reach if it was a paper magazine. But while the content and reach has grown the market hasn't. There is only so much content I can consume and frankly most of it isn't worth it. I do not need to the read the 1000th angst filled novel with a dystopian world view.
Maybe if nobody is willing to pay for your book it just isn't good enough. Is that such a complex concept?
The article talks about the great novels written under the patronage system... and forgets the torrent of drivel that history rightfully forgot about. I am actually a bit of a fan of drivel, the "dollar" books series, the works of Brian Daley or even Alen Dean Foster and "worse". Commercial trash that none at Salon would defend BUT they do sell, the authors DO make a living at them.
How am I supposed to feel sympathy for a group of people unable to make a living who sneer at a people in the same group who do make a living at the same job? It reminds me a bit of most feminists who want to fight for the right for women to be ceo's. I notice that the picket line demanding women can be garbage collectors is far far shorter.
There are people struggling to raise their family working double jobs. Crying that you can't sell your book written at Starbucks is NOT going to pull any heart strings.
Get a job. Write in your spare time. If you are any good, you will make it. If not, then you ain't any good. Though shit. We all got a book inside of us, and that is where it should stay.
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 :-)
Ahh Good Old Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
"Rich people should pay to entertain me" is possibly the single greatest populist cause in history! Demand those circuses!
Just authors? (Score:3)
The days where anyone can make a living off their work is relic of the 20th century.
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
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Oh my! So many dicks...so little time! HUGLURHLUGHRLUH!
Re:1 million downloads @ 99c is still 990,000 doll (Score:5, Insightful)
And how many people have 1 million downloads? I would say the minority, and not the majority...
Re:1 million downloads @ 99c is still 990,000 doll (Score:5, Interesting)
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Oh that is hooey... Please read the book, "Why Are Artists Poor" from Amazon. I read this book nearly 7 years ago because I wanted to understand the economics of open source by using a basis case of the arts.
The arts is a patronage system and guess what only a few artists make money. As the author points out the arts is a winner take all type of patronage system. It has to do with the lopsidedness of the economics. He makes the case that at least with say the previous system of copyright the monies are dist
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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.
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You are speaking of an age before the printing press. Gutenberg's press became available in 1450, he finished printing his first bibles in 1455. I am guessing the invention and the subsequent widespread availability of the movable type press has more to do with the spread of books than copyright issues.
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So the rest of the writers will just have to get by with less, like most of us?
The real enemy of authors is not 1 buck/download.
The real enemy of authors is obscurity. If people don't know that your work exists, they are unlikely to buy it no matter how good it is.
You could be the greatest author in the world as judged by all the book critics, so what?
It's been proven that hardly anyone cares if a great violinist busks in the subway, he'll get 30 bucks or so[1]. Whereas if Justin Bieber did a little song an
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It's been proven that hardly anyone cares if a great violinist busks in the subway, he'll get 30 bucks or so. Whereas if Justin Bieber did a little song and dance in a subway there'd be chaos from all the screaming fans.
So what?
If the Great Violinist rents a huge venue and Justin rents the same venue Justin still wins.
The venu has nothing to do with popularity, nor does the route taken to get the ebook on the market.
Content it what matters. With performance, content includes more than just the music.
With the written word, not so much.
When buying books from Publishing House or a system of Patronage, you have already surrendered the first level of judgement to someone else.
(This is not always a bad thing, given we each only
Re:1 million downloads @ 99c is still 990,000 doll (Score:4, Insightful)
They could, if they worked at it. Writers and other artists have to start working at creating a more personal relationship with their audience again. This is what the internet excels at: blog, tweet, create video's, provide your readers with a place to discuss your work and chime in once in a while. Neil Gaiman [neilgaiman.com] seems like one of the few authors who get this, Doctorow [craphound.com] is another. When people recognize you as a real human being, one with whom their share a bond through your creations, they will be willing to pay.
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When people recognize you as a real human being, one with whom their share a bond through your creations, they will be willing to pay.
+1 insightful
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No wrong the Internet will be willing to pay for a few, but not for many. I reference the book, "Why Are Artists Poor" from Amazon. It is a winner take all type of society. A few will make money, but the vast majority will need to search for a day job. I am not knocking it, but it is what it is and anyone thinking it is otherwise is deluding themselves.
I will give you an example where I personally talked to the Author. Bruce Eckel. He gave away his book and open sourced it. He looked for patronage. The resu
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Yes, but the mount of money that a best selling author makes on a given copy is probably only 10%, if you cut the price down to $1 or $2 and self publish through Amazon you'd get $0.30 or $0.70 per copy sold. Or $350k on 1 million copies. Whereas you might get $500k on a similar number of paperbacks selling for $5 a copy. But, when all is said and done, you just have to convince the potential reader that your particular book is worth 20% of the cost of a paperback book in order to make the sale.
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Tiered pricing. Sell the digital copy for $ 0.99 a pop, paperbacks for $5, hardbacks for $20, signed editions for $50, etc. That way you can get the book out there to the masses for a reasonable price and allow your biggest fans to show their appreciation by buying something more permanent. Not coincidentally, this is also how Kickstarter [kickstarter.com] works and what a lot of webcomic artists do.
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Yes, but the mount of money that a best selling author makes on a given copy is probably only 10%, if you cut the price down to $1 or $2 and self publish through Amazon you'd get $0.30 or $0.70 per copy sold. Or $350k on 1 million copies. Whereas you might get $500k on a similar number of paperbacks selling for $5 a copy. But, when all is said and done, you just have to convince the potential reader that your particular book is worth 20% of the cost of a paperback book in order to make the sale.
Your estimates for publishing house earnings may be a bit optimistic at 10%.
See this author's story: http://www.genreality.net/the-reality-of-a-times-bestseller [genreality.net]
Until you are an established writer, or already famous for another reason, you can expect to make somewhere between Didly and Squat on your first book.
If you are either established, or famous, I suspect you could make just as much money selling either via cheap downloads or publishing house production.
The two dollar to three dollar download is actual
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Re:1 million downloads @ 99c is still 990,000 doll (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok 9,990 dollars for a book as an income? That is a joke! And yes even 10,000 downloads is still quite outrageous. Take a look at Robert Scobles the long tail. He said that people would buy more and the monies would be distributed more fairly. This is called the long tail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail [wikipedia.org]
However, the long tail has been debunked:
Also in 2008, a sales analysis of an unnamed UK digital music service by economist Will Page and high-tech entrepreneur Andrew Bud found that sales exhibited a log-normal distribution rather than a power law; they reported that 80 percent of the music tracks available sold no copies at all over a one-year period.
I have seen it myself first hand. With Google, search engines, etc we are doing pin hole searches. Where in the past we would have a broad horizon now we google and get a pin hole view of the world. We don't get the diversity that we used to before. Thus the log tail does not exist.
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And how many people have 1 million downloads? I would say the minority, and not the majority...
And how many people have books available for 99 cents? Certainly not the majority.
There is starting to be a fairly healthy self publishing industry, supported by Amazon's "Kindle Direct" and Barns & Noble''s "PubIt" and Lulu etc which allow authors to get books into ebook markets fairly easily. Sadly, some people simply write a crappy introduction to some public domain Classic, and try to pawn it off as a new work, but by and large this does not succeed.
But baring this, the 99 cent ebook really hasn't
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And how many people have 1 million downloads? I would say the minority, and not the majority...
And how many books are worth reading? I would say the minority, and not the majority...
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"The vast majority of free ebooks really are unreadable"
Then you are either stupid or a tool.
HG Wells entire works are FREE.
Shakespeare's works are completely FREE
over at project Gutenberg there are tens of thousands of FREE ebooks written by people that are a lot better at writing than you ever will be and have written amazing things. Utterly amazing books. in fact you can spend your entire life reading only books written by the greatest writers and you will die before you finish them.
maybe if you had a
Re:1 million downloads @ 99c is still 990,000 doll (Score:5, Insightful)
The average author (even through major publishers) makes only single-digit thousands of dollars per title. Most titles are lucky to sell a few thousand copies.
One might argue that a $0.99 model might make your product more likely to be an impulse buy even if you have no intention of reading it, but that's the only way such a low price point will drive sales up, and maybe not even then. Odds are, you'll still sell only a few thousand copies, only now you'll make $0.30 each instead of a buck or two. It seems obvious that without a MUCH better division of profits between the author and the distributor, authors cannot make a living selling eBooks at $0.99. Any argument to the contrary, being an extraordinary claim, thus demands extraordinary proof.
There's also the problem that this ignores all the psychology involved in setting prices. In the absence of some reason to buy a specific book, if the majority of folks sell eBooks at $0.99, your best bet for high sales is to sell yours at $1.29, not $0.79. By setting a higher price, you are actually more likely to get sales because people will look at it and say, "This author thinks that his/her work is better than the rest of the stuff on the market." This will tend to drive prices back up as soon as somebody tries a $0.99 pricing model, and more to the point, will seriously diminish (if not eliminate) any additional sales that an author would otherwise have gotten from pricing his or her books at a disposable $0.99 price because it will seem so much cheaper than other books on the market.
I would actually argue that books are currently way underpriced. A new release of a movie gives you two hours of enjoyment for $20. A new release of a hardcover book gives you significantly more than two hours of enjoyment for that same $20 unless you're speed reading (and probably even then). Based on that, an eBook at $0.99 would be absurdly underpriced, which would cause anyone who looked at it to assume that it must be crap to be priced at such a deep discount. No one wants a book that the author thinks is worth only as much as a three minute music download. If you calculate the price of a book based on the amount of time it takes to write, edit, and format a book compared with the time it takes to write, record, and edit a song, a good novel should cost a couple hundred dollars. It's way, way, way more work. You can certainly use that as an argument that music is massively overpriced (and you'll get no disagreement from me), but as a seller, you have to work within the market as it exists, not as you think it should be.
Finally, there's the rather fundamental problem that an eBook that dramatically undercuts the price of the printed page will tend to cut the knees out from under your print sales. No publisher will be willing to do this, and no author who has any intention of ever releasing a print edition will do this, either. The cost of printing makes selling a paper copy at or near the $1 mark utterly impractical. Thus, by setting an eBook price that does not take into account the cost of other media, you'd be shooting yourself in the foot.
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A new release of a movie gives you two hours of enjoyment for $20. A new release of a hardcover book gives you significantly more than two hours of enjoyment for that same $20 unless you're speed reading (and probably even then).
"Hours of enjoyment" is not a proper measure for worth. Otherwise you would say that, for example, a roller coaster is not worth it because it only gives a few minutes of enjoyment, costs about as much as a (cheap) book and if you want to ride it again you have to pay again (where you can read the book multiple times and even lend it to friends).
A lot of people measure worth by how much they enjoyed it (not how long) and also by the perceived cost of making. A roller coaster needs a lot of electricity, main
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Re:1 million downloads @ 99c is still 990,000 doll (Score:4, Insightful)
Whatever point you were trying to make was wasted by that statement. It's a pretty tired old statement that really ignores dozens of factors and really isn't remotely relevant. Why is a movie the benchmark? I could go to the country fair all day for $3. By that logic a movie is seriously over priced. Movies are overpriced though. But you'd claim the county fair is under priced.
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the writer gets maybe 30 cents out of that 99 cents. So if your book is popular, you get an income over months or years that may add up to 300000 pre-tax dollars or somewhere slightly above 200000 post-tax dollars. If it takes someone 5 years to a decade to write his book, he'll be seriously struggling. Even if he finishes quickly, he'll be slaving at part time jobs and burning through savings. In such an environment, a patronage model sounds incredibly attractive.
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If it takes someone 5 years to a decade to write his book, he'll be seriously struggling.
If it takes someone 5 years to write a book they should find another profession. Of the authors I follow -- only one is so slow that it takes him 4 years to complete a book (and while I think his books are excellent, I wish he was starving more so that he would increase his production rate). Most authors I follow are able to get a book out in a year or less (and/or have other jobs).
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If it takes someone 5 years to write a book they should find another profession.
Tolkien's fscked then.
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The Lord Of The Rings is three books...
It was written as one book and split into three parts by the publisher because a single book would have cost too much to print.
Re:1 million downloads @ 99c is still 990,000 doll (Score:4, Insightful)
Tolkien had a day job.
Yeah, and? Do you really think his family -- and, indeed, the reading public -- would be happier if he'd forgotten about that writing nonsense and stuck to his day job?
A bit combative are we?
The point us: he could AFFORD take 5 years and not be fscked. (or hungry or homeless).
His work supported his writing and allowed him the luxury of careful craftsmanship, which is far too often missing in popular authors.
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Wasn't Harry Potter (the first one) written in a month?
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Well, there is some party getting way too much money here. Except for the author and the reader (ok, maybe one editor, but not that mcuh), everybody else is optional and should get rewarded as such.
Middleman know that, and are betting on copywrigth to keep the authors captive, and DRM to keep the readers locked. Both will not work for long.
Re:1 million downloads @ 99c is still 990,000 doll (Score:4, Insightful)
> Well, there is some party getting way too much money here.
Is this based on anything like fact, or are you assuming that everybody in the entire publishing process should be providing their services for near free, and thus high quality books should be near free?
Sorry, my guess is you're too young to have had any real world experience with commerce, but in the real world, almost anything involving actual people costs a lot. Very few are getting rich and there isn't a secret conspiracy of rich people lighting cigars with the money you're paying for your books and entertainment.
To professionally publish a book, costs thousands for editors, book designers, book cover artists, accountants, inventory management, (and for paper books) warehousing, shippers, transport, more inventory management and of course the infrastructure to support this all.
Sorry for coming down so hard, but honestly, this vague "everyone is getting rich but me" is just way too common as the rallying cry of people who find it too much work to actually learn that usually nobody in the whole supply chain is getting rich. In fact, the real fear is often that the guys at the top are *losing* money and may give up on the whole chain!
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> you're paying for energy, internet and taxes. Especially taxes.
I don't know those particular industries, but unless you have direct experience with those in the industry to the contrary, I'd be *really* suspicious of claims about fat cats there as well.
I am certain there are a few of the "undeserved rich" (for lack of a better term) here and there, but my general experience is that people over-estimate the number of people "getting away with it" by about a factor of a thousand.
Just remember that your b
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I'm going to guess, based solely on my knowledge of royalties from the record industry, that at 99c a book, the author is getting maybe 5c, if that.
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I'm going to guess, based solely on my knowledge of royalties from the record industry, that at 99c a book, the author is getting maybe 5c, if that.
$0.35, so even those who are selling a million books aren't making a lot of money (I wouldn't turn down $350,000 but it's not enough to live like Castle or Higgins). In any case, the $0.99 price point seems to be collapsing right now as more people see it as a swamp of crap than a good place to find new writers; plenty of writers have said recently that their sales went up when they increased the price to $2.99-4.99 and at $4.99 you're making ten times as much on a sale as at $0.99.
Re:Don't worry writers (Score:4, Funny)
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Reality is even stranger than that, with Tom Clancy selling his name as a brand to put on books written by other authors.
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Don't underestimate monkeys writing Shakespeare
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I think that's implied if it's something which can replace most writers.
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And I'm sure they will be boring and formulaic.
And how is that different from 90% of the writers out there?
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Exactly. Have you been in a book shop lately? There's way too many books.
They all have glowing reviews* on the back cover. Sorting the wheat from the chaff is now impossible.
(*) Machine-generated?
Re:Don't worry writers (Score:4, Insightful)
"Sorting the wheat from the chaff is now impossible."
yes if you are one of those that must have the new releases! OHHH IT"S NEW GOTTA GOTTA!!!!
If you wait a year, suddenly the good books are obvious and the crap is in the $0.99 bin. I end up look less trendy, and less like a lemming and I end up spending less because I also end up paying for it used. But then I'm evil. Only evil people buy used books.
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I don't feel like I'm being watched by big brother because Amazon knows I like Alastair Reynolds novels. I actually like it, because I find tons of great new books and authors I never would have heard about without their recommendations, which are based on their records of the other novels I've purchased.
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Wow. Talk about "out of touch"....
Reynolds Wrap much?
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Bullshit.
The new generation is the generation that cares least about privacy. Yes, I've seen the privacy protests, but they are posers. They protest about privacy issues when it is popular. (And I have seen several cases where their privacy wasn't even being threatened but the posers were out in force anyway.) The rest of the time, they are generally busy posting things on facebook that people of my generation (at least the smart ones) wouldn't even share in a conversation.
They don't want privacy. They want
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A return to serial novels? It's already being done by some writers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_(literature) [wikipedia.org]
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If people are going to pay 99 cents for one book, then why not just publish the same story in multiple shorter books (like 50 pages each)? This way there would more more constant income all the time. Also this would reduce the effort to get something published for young writers.
Because it would be a good way to piss off your audience? I find it bad enough when novels are split across multiple books. If you start dribbling the story out in 50 page chunks (with each chunk required to have a cliff hanger to keep me coming back), I'll quickly find a different author.
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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 o
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Replying again because I forgot to address this point. I think you're failing to note that this only applies to already-successful authors. They can make more money selling electronic versions because they are already famous. People are already paying to seek out
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Nobody said it should cost three times what the paperback costs. I said it made sense for it to cost a bit more.
It makes no sense, since an ebook offers the reader less than a print book; for example, you can't sell the ebook and you can't lend it to your grandmother.
No successful self-publisher sells ebooks for more than print books. Only trade publishers think it makes any kind of sense, and that's because they're protecting their print market.
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