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Should Book Authors Pursue a Patronage Model?
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?"
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.
Isnt that enough?
Just write books and sell them for a buck a pop. What's wrong with that?
I notice that many publishers still insist on charging MORE for the e-book than for the paperback, despite the fact that the e-book can't be loaned out or resold. No wonder people are angry at them.
Get the net. Sell many copies for a low price. Accept that it is a competitive market and innovate a good means for people to search for and find books that will interest them.
If you wind up having to work a day job too, cry me a river, build a bridge and GET OVER IT.
If you charge $1 to suck a dick and then suck 1 billion dicks, you'll be a billionaire!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
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.
Not for people born under the old paradigm.
Open Design has been running patronage projects for role playing games for many years now. There system works very well. People can pay for various levels of commitment which gives them various levels of input into the design of the adventure or world being created. I'm a big fan of their work, and it has provided Open Design with a solid customer base. This is a list of recent stuff going on with them. And, here is a list of their current projects. If you are interested in chatting about this process, their forums are fairly active.
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.
For me, price is not an issue.
I will not sign up for an account to read. I will not give out my name, address, phone number, and email address to read. I will not turn my reading preferences over to a large corporation or to marketers. My choice in literature will not be used to build a demeaning "consumer profile" or barrage me with unwanted advertisements for things I don't need. My reading preference will never be made a commodity and sold because I will never allow it to be collected.
Reading is a right, not a privilege to subscribers.
I will not buy a device which can revoke my right to read. I will not collect works subject to DRM or self-deletion.
Big content needs to get this through its thick, stubborn head.
Big content is out of touch with the thinking of a new generation.
Patronage is one solution which dissociates the identification, money, and marketing from the ideas being distributed.
And how many people have 1 million downloads? I would say the minority, and not the majority...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
The problem is making your book stand out from the 1,000 other books that get published each month. It's not easy, even if you only charge 99 cents. And if 100 of those other authors are also charging 99 cents, you're pretty much screwed.
Write a good novel, and some Hollywood studio will buy rights and then likely sit on them without ever making a movie.
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. It seems to work in some cases and fail in others, just like any writing venture. It just moves who has control into the hands of the public.
Of course there is nothing wrong with publishing an e-book for 99 cents and making money on a large volume of sales if it is good enough and promoted well enough. It just means there are more unrealistically optimistic writers who enter the market with works that never turn a profit and are usually just not very good. It still beats hoping some publisher will be willing to take the chance on your behalf.
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 make art to sell, while others are commissioned to do a work for a specific price. Either works, and I don't see why there's a debate about one vs. the other.
There are 7 billion people in the world and growing. About a half billion speak English. Literacy is at its highest in history. The patronage system existed at a time when there was less than a billion people. When the closest thing to a global language was Latin. A time when most people couldn't read or write. Also with the print publishing system authors were already making only a few dollars per sale. (Most went to publisher and retail stores.) The economics of writing is still good. Some would say its the start of a golden age for writers.
The reality is that most authors don't make that much from a book that sells for $28. A 99-cent payment is about half what an author gets from a book. So, the e-book model is actually pretty sustainable--that is except for the big 6 publishers in NYC. They can't afford to support a big pile of corporate interests on such little money but authors can do fine on that--IF they can get their books noticed.
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 and dance in a subway there'd be chaos from all the screaming fans.
Go figure.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
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 seems like one of the few authors who get this, Doctorow 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.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
This also applies to software.
Each of you programmers would have to find a patron, whom you would fawn over at the beginning of your code. (A few centibytes of alphanumeric praise should suffice.)
This would apply to any creative endeavor, such as music.
Mirabile dictu! We're back in the 17th century.
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.
The publishing overhead is what took away most of the money in the first place, 99 cents seems like a fair price.
I think what your looking for is tenure at a University. Study English and get a Masters? Doctorate? and get a teaching position.
10,000 downloads doesn't sound too outrageous, and that's still a lot more than most authors make per book in the traditional model...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I've read anecdotes from several authors of technical books (oreilly, ms press, etc) who have said that the royalties didn't even come close to paying for the time that went into writing the book. However, they went on to note that publishing the book contributed greatly to their career and/or quantity/quality of the consulting gigs they got.
I.e. the book acts as a loss leader.
As far as patrons go, I think that that model would be quite valid, and kickstarter has proven that you can do such things very easily @ internet scale.
Personally, I'd love to see the netflix streaming model applied to books. Instead of paying per book, give me access to the entire Amazon Kindle library. I'll gladly pay, say, $200/year, and I can read all the books I want. Reward the authors whose books get read more with more cash, and maybe include a tip jar right there to contribute more directly to the author. I hate having to look through all the recommendations and decide what's worth spending $7.99 on, or skipping on things that might look interesting because I'm scared I'm going to buy it and it turns out I don't like the author. Or, worse, buying it and then realizing "wow, this is terrible, but I kind of have to finish it because I spent 8 bucks on it."
I don't know how that would work on the back end for compensating authors, but as a consumer I'd love it.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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 works and what a lot of webcomic artists do.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Look, with all due respect, why should authors, and the copyright industry, get a perpetual free ride from a one time effort?
Don't we all create the future?
Speaking with 35 years in broadcasting, let me have my say.
The colleges are turning out hordes of Meeja Studies graduates who think they that deserve the big bucks straight away.
The old pros like me know that they are worth jack shit, for at least the first 10 years, but given the numbers of them, and their sense of entitlement, things don't look too good.
I've met swathes of young directors who aren't fit to shovel shit, and I'm sure that there exists a similar number of wanna-be writers out there who have been told, by their college creative writing tutors, that their outpourings are worth paying for - they need to get a fucking life and pronto. The more of them that exist, the lower that the average price for their work becomes...... what's hard to understand about that
Thank fuck that I intend to retire at the end of the year - I'm sick of these needy fuckers!
On a 99 cent book, the author gets 35 cents.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
There's just too many authors and too many books these days. The market has been driven downwards by the glut. The good books are worth the money, but there's too many writers that write crap or just churn out large numbers of cheap pulp.
Not only that, novels are ballooning into multi hundred page monstrosities. Who has the time to read them all? Bring back the better written 100-200 page novels. Word processors have allowed more writing, but very little of that is good writing.
Oh my! So many dicks...so little time! HUGLURHLUGHRLUH!
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 been given a real chance yet.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
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...
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.
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
I'd be for anything that gets agents out of the way.
Fewer gatekeepers is always a good thing.
Why should anyone care that an author made a bad contractual obligation? These authors would not give one goddamn if any of their readers made a bad contractual obligation. The whole Huffington Post "article" is nothing more than a "Boohoo, cry for me" plea. Where is the post for people to cry about losing their jobs, and still being unemployed, after many years? Where are these crying authors for those people?
I do feel bad for people who enter into agreements that impact them negatively. In the end, though, those people choose to make that bad deal. If these authors dislike Amazon's rather horrid pricing agreement, at $.99(It is a dollar, people, quit penny shaving), then the authors need to create their own platform, where they can deliver digital copies of their books and reap a larger portion of the bounty. The fact is, these authors have options, but they would rather bemoan their station in life, or cry about their horrible books.
Either negotiate better, renegotiate, take your business somewhere else, or shut the fuck up. If I can do it for my business, authors can do it for their business.
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).
As an aspiring author and someone of means, I'd love to be a patron but I'd rather work 80-hours a week at McDonald's while I write than have a patron.
If it takes someone 5 years to write a book they should find another profession.
Tolkien's fscked then.
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.
Find free books.
Here in Europe there are much more writers that could survive on sales, most of them living off of government money.
book, why do you think some rich patron would fund you? Face it, you're a crappy writer.
can't be loaned out or sold
Seriously? People are willing to put up with DRMed BOOKS now?
Or sell your books and ebooks for whatever you want, and give them away for free as well. It works pretty damn well for Baen, and pretty damn well for me too. I can't count how many times I've bought the first book in a series, finished it, ordered the next, and then started reading it right away from the free version while I wait for it to be delivered.
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.
I'm willing to pay $2.99 for a good book. I might be willing to pay 99 cents for a piece of trash. What I'm not willing to do is to pay the same price for an e-book as I would for the currently in print version, especially when the in print version is a $25 hard cover. Understandably, there are greater costs when it comes to technical works. But, people do not and will not care about the author's labor. They care about the enjoyment they get out of it. People generally enjoy print books more and therefor value them more and are willing to pay more for them. Just like everything else, a book is worth what someone is willing to pay for it.
The essential problem with selling downloadable content, which all consumers grasp intuitively but that publishers seem foggy on, is that the supply is functionally infinite. Econ 101 teaches the supply vs demand pressures on pricing. In the case of printed books, the publishers have to predict demand, then they print the amount of books they expect to be able to sell, and they mostly sell then at a fixed-ish price. Around 20 to 30 bucks for a hardback, discounted to about 18 if they don't sell. Paperbacks sell for around 6 to 10. That artificially limits supply and helps them keep prices stable. After all, if you see a book on the shelf that interests you, you know that it may not be available next month or next year. But with ebooks, there is no limit to supply. Buyers know they can get a copy, unless the publisher stops selling, and they know that it costs the the publishers virtually nothing to keep a copy on their servers for anyone to download 2, 5, 10 years down the line, and they know that it costs the publisher virtually nothing to sell them a copy. Publishers have been very good at predicting demand for printed books. What publishers have been very bad at is estimating how much people are willing to pay for ebooks. Instead, the large publishing houses seem to have been operating in a way to protect their print book sales from erosion by ebooks.
This is too bad, because what major publishers bring to the table is the expertise to help an author refine their work and market it effectively. They also have reputations to protect, so what they print will not totally suck, and consumers know that. But, if these publishers don't adapt to the times, they will go out of business. What publishers need to do is to realize that X number of people are willing to buy at 5.99, y number of people will buy at 2.99, and z number of people will buy at 0.99. They should be pricing ebooks dynamically. Introduce them high to get the established fans and let the price drop accordingly as demand lessens. If demand spikes as word spreads, then let the price rise as well.
Right, because there's no such thing as a keygen.
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.
Rethinking email
I thought you just needed to buy the kindle and then download the ebookz
Instead of pursuing money from just one rich person like in the past when wealth was mainly concentrated in the coffers of kings and the people they liked, today you can crowdfund using smaller donations from several people.
What all you fail to comprehend is books are works of an idea. A position in society. A thought. We're not talking about trashy romance novels that already go for 2 bucks. Ideas transcend our lives. Many times you can see this guy is different, on the edge. Who knows it may be important, if not now. Maybe later. That is the purpose of the written record. Thats what patrons did. Allowed a writer to write, usual cause the patron saw eye to eye on one topic. But that writer was also expressing other ideas in his work.
The way it is now only those that make it commercial pass on ideas. But guess what, if a person has one true breakthrough in his life even that is worth recording so as not to be lost by ravages of time.
If you read the whole 200 pages the author gets $2. you lose interest after 3 pages they get 3c.
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Wasn't Harry Potter (the first one) written in a month?
No sig today...
The Lord Of The Rings is three books...
No sig today...
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.
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 how little you know of the world. I think wikileaks should be funded... can I donate through paypal? So much for you freedom in funding. The rich still decide how the money flows.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"Rich people should pay to entertain me" is possibly the single greatest populist cause in history! Demand those circuses!
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.
Judging from the plot, probably in a week
It's a not a one for one comparison, mostly based on the distribution model. A programmer (typically) has a job. They get a regular and predictable paycheck, health insurance, 401K, etc. Authors work for themselves. They make whatever their book sells, have to provide themselves with any insurance they need, etc. I'm not saying every author needs to make a million dollar a year to survive (that's patently ridiculous, and I doubt any but the best known do), but comparing it to a programming gig with a company is not reasonable either.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Ah yes, Tolkien, that quintessential commercial writer.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
When it's a CEO the perception is he is a platypus (they don't do much). A CEO making 35% of a company's profit? Street riots. When it is an author, he is somehow being cheated (even though as you say he agreed to the contract).
As an aspiring author, I will be seeking out a publisher. I don't mind having to pay the folks who print my books, the folks who ship them, who shelve them, who tell me they are crap and to fix them, who market them, or the CEO/shareholders, etc. of the place that does all this for me. Why? Because even if I write the Great American Novel, the only way to make money off of it and to get it in the hands of millions is to have those folks on my side. Sure, I *might* be able to do it myself, but that's an additional risk, and as an author, I think just writing is risk enough. Marketing is also a hell of a lot of work. I'd rather leave it to the pros.
Ah yes, Tolkien, that quintessential commercial writer.
Selling 50,000,000 copies of a book isn't bad for a commercial writer.
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 have so much time to spend reading. Society and civilization is built on the judgement of our predecessors. All new things are obscure at first.)
But with publishing or patronage, obscurity is just as often the result, the final result, and the only result.
At least with the 99cent download (or free download) the consumers do not have to surrender their first level of judgement to someone else, and each can read, review, and rate as they see fit. 99cent downloads with crowd sourced rating works just as well as some editor sitting in an office at bring new content to the market.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
EBooks are beyond my grandmother's capabilities. I love her, but I am not going to mince hairs. How does she pick books? Yard sales and and the late local Walden's books bargain bin. Anything not in that bin was not worth getting in her mind.
Worrying about the 99 centers is basing the whole industry just on my grandmother. Prices do need to come down to compensate for the lesser amount of fixed costs with physically bound the books. Some people only bought books from dollar stores. Should B&N and the industry retool itself for that?
Yes, at $0.99 some can do the volume game. Some can't. That doesn't mean panic or praise the 99 centers this early in the market in a rash judgement just yet.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
Also, if you're a programmer making only $60,000 in any major city, you're underpaid by at least a factor of 1.5, and as you said, if that's your total compensation, you're underpaid by a lot more than that.
Once you factor in health insurance, 401k matching, Medicare and SSI/SDI, leasing a building, maintaining that building, electricity, I'm told that an average engineer costs a company on the order of $250–300,000 per year, at least in the Silicon Valley. Admittedly, most authors don't lease an office, but an author still has to pay for much of that himself or herself, which means that an author would need to gross well over $150,000 to make as much money as a Silicon Valley programmer.
In reality, the average author grosses almost nothing; the average novel sells only about 500 copies annually, and only about 6,000 over its lifetime, which is why nearly all authors these days are doing their writing in addition to their regular job. You're lucky if you can make ten grand a year as an author, which is not enough to live on.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Unless you are one of the VERY few authors who are marketed by major publishers with a campaign, you aren't going to make enough money on your book to notice. Remember you have to pay taxes on what you get, plus you pay both employer and employee FICA for 1099 book royalty income. And you'll be one of the top authors if you sell enough to cover your advance, let alone make money. Considering you'll make pennies per hour on your book, you'd be better off writing it under a CC license, using LaTeX to make your own PDF of camera-ready art, and sharing it online. At least then, you'll feel like you're contributing to humanity rather than doing a whole lot of work and getting paid less than you'd make collecting aluminum cans. (Full disclosure: I wrote a book in the late 1990s.)
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
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 actually quite a popular price point for well rated ebooks via direct-to-ebook self publishing channels such as Barnes and Noble or Amazon. The problem with these is a lot of them skip the Editor's desk, and it shows.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
The mid-list authors I've met seem to make $30-50k as a typical advance. Write two novels a year and you're able to live quite well.
Of course you need to write something that people want to read and find a publisher who doesn't decide they're no longer going to sell your genre and dump you overnight.
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.
Weird, because plenty of self-published ebook authors also sell print versions of their books. They don't care whether you buy a $15 print book or a $5 ebook because they make about the same amount of money either way.
Publishers hate ebooks because control of print distribution into bookstores is about all they have to keep successful authors tied to them.
Maybe the era of industrially manufactured content is just over. Whenever I hear musicians talking about what they do, it's basically albums for marketing purposes with the real revenue product being concerts. This certainly paints record companies as relics of the industrial age, fixated on physical products, not willing to move on.
So how do authors (and/or publishers) move on from the physical-era model of book publishing? Suppose buying a book let you into an online community where you could interact with the book, its supporting material, the author, other readers. Participate in work on followups to the book. In other words, transform from an industry focused on single-physical-product transactions to a model of an ongoing, content-related relationship.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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 distributed more fairly. His contention and it is not wrong is that most people don't give to the arts, and only a small minority do. And that small minority determines who wins or who loses. This is why you have arts where people crucify mary, and fling feces around. The small minority thinks that is art, whereas the majority does not.
Take a look at open source. It is widely used, but only the minority can make money. Open Source is a patronage system and it is not as successful as closed source software in pure fiscal terms. I am not knocking Open Source because I use it extensively myself. However I do not delude myself into thinking that I can earn millions from Open Source. I use Open Source to solve problems other than selling software. Open Source has slaughtered the for pay software model. I am not dissing the result, I am just stating facts as they are.
Thus to say this will be the golden age for writers IMO is deluding yourself... It will be the age where there will be more writers with more opinions, but definitely not more monies...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
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.
So they're going to discourage piracy by increasing the price so that free pirate download looks much, much better than paying $20 for an ebook of a novel you could buy in paperback for $6.99?
Back in the real world, publishers hate ebooks because once successful authors realise they can make more money by self-publishing an ebook for $4.99 than they do from selling a hardback through a publisher, they'll abandon publishing in droves.
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 result is that people bought less of his books. If you look at his newer editions of the same books he does not give away everything. He gives samples, and then you need to buy the rest. The reality is that people will not pay, and will not want to give money...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
The whole "my work *better* be worth more than a dollar per consumer" ideology is a good way to screw yourself over as a business. With essentially limitless supply, you can play all sorts of games with per unit price and volume sold to maximize revenue. If that price point is 50 cents, so be it.
The problem as the first article points out is the author who does most of the heavy lifting gets only 35% at that pricing tier with amazon. This is insane, and the remedy for that is not to play by amazon's game and price yourself into the next tier for a favorable cut, it's to *really* self publish. Get yourself some hosting and sell direct to people. If you even only managed to move the *same* volume at 0.99, you'd probably break even given how much you get to keep. This is what I've failed to understand, in the age of digital distribution people still latch onto monolithic distributor relationships.
Never having sold through amazon, do they demand that you never sell it elsewhere? Could you put your work in the kindle store at a higher cost to offset Amazon's cut and then self-host and undercut amazon?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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
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.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Here is where you get statistics wrong. The minority of books for you are readable. However, for the crowd the majority of books are readable. But because of word of mouth and pin holing information flow the crowd has determined a minority of books are readable or even accessible.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Ebooks have lowered the barrier to entry by removing the middleman. This has lead to a lot more authors than they used to be, but people don't spend more on books. If there's double the authors but not double the spending on books, authors receive half the money they used to.
If authors could make 60K a year that would be amazing... but sadly even that is not easily possible... Especially not with 99 cent books.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Admittedly, most authors don't lease an office, but an author still has to pay for much of that himself or herself, which means that an author would need to gross well over $150,000 to make as much money as a Silicon Valley programmer.
But authors don't have to _LIVE_ in Silicon Valley. They can live in a much cheaper place where they don't need to make $150,000 a year to have a half-decent life.
In reality, the average author grosses almost nothing
That's because the 'average author' 'sells' a short story to a magazine every other year and the magazine only gives them a few free copies as payment. By that standard, the 'average programmer' grossed almost nothing after the dot-com crash when they were unemployed.
The article is a little behind the times. Yeah, a lot of authors (and I'm speaking here of writers who have proven they have the chops, being traditionally published also) were nervous about the 99-cent "race to the bottom". But these days a lot of readers are being heard from who wouldn't touch a 0.99 e-book, many of which frankly aren't worth the time to read even the free sample most outlets offer. (Note, I'm talking 99 cent novels here; 99 cents is a common - and acceptable - price point for a short story "single".)
Look at professional but self-publishing writers like Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, or JA Konrath (whom all also traditionally publish, although Konrath is getting out of that): their pricing is something like 0.99 for a short, 1.99-2.99 for a short novel (novelette) or collection of 5 or 6 stories, and 3.99-4.99 for a full length novel or longer collection.
Their sales are not hurting at the higher prices, in fact they're making more money. As far as readers are concerned, that's still cheaper than a mass-market paperback or a cup of coffee at Starbucks, so why not?
Sure, there are always a few who want it free, but when paying a buck or two or three is easier and safer than finding a pirated version, most folks will pay the money. As iTunes proved. And before you bring up DRM, most indie/self-published stuff is DRM-free. It's the big publishing houses that slap DRM and high prices on their e-books, to help discourage cannibalization of their dead-tree version sales. (And yes, you can read that as "to reduce their e-book sales".)
I'm a professional (but far from full-time) writer too, with stuff in magazines like Analog Science Fiction (and, back in the day, Byte) and a few e-books/e-stories up on various sites. No, I don't expect to get rich off of it -- most people don't, just as most people who play baseball or football don't make it to the big leagues. But writers -- those who are dedicated to their craft and put in the time and effort, same as any other profession -- can still make a living at it. No question that the industry is shifting, just as the music industry has, but it's not dead yet, nor is it likely to be in the near future. Some players will fade, others will rise, but in the long run quality demand beats quantity demand.
-- Alastair
My point was rather the other way around; Tolkien wrote his books for himself, their existence was responsible for their success, not his desire to be a successful commercial writer.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
If authors could make 60K a year that would be amazing... but sadly even that is not easily possible...
There are plenty of authors making $60k a year.
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, maintenance etc, so the price is justified. The movie costs a lot for the cinema to get (because it costs lots of millions to make), the projector needs electricity, maintenance, the cinema building also requires maintenance and other stuff, so it is possible to justify that (though cinema tickets are a bit overpriced).
So, you are saying that a book costs as much to write and print (or upload to a server) that it is on the same level with the costs associated with running a cinema?
On a 99 cent book, the author gets 35 cents.
Depends on the sales system the author uses.
One of the biggest is Barnes and Noble. Their PubIt service gives the author 60%.
Amazon's Self Publish program gives 70% royalties to the author in certain markets, (List price minus delivery price of around 15 cents per megabyte).
Ebooks sold thru the major publishing houses usually yield far less than 35%, because they amortize the entire publishing process and some authors report they ding you for lost dead tree book sales due to ebook sales bases on a formula, which the author is contractually precluded from making public.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Hell, John Locke built his million-ebook career on exactly this, with a few carefully targeted blog posts. He decided who the target market was for his thrillers, and fine-tuned his approach to appeal to those people. Not that he was being phony about it (he claims), just selective.
-- Alastair
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.
Smashwords.com and Amazon Kindle have had such functionality since their inception, to the best of my knowledge. Smashwords typically recommends 20-50% sampling for its authors. I'm not sure what length of sample Kindle generally uses, but I believe it's at least two chapters.
Tolkien had a day job.
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Not my point. The point was that even if the author lives in a place where a programmer would make $60,000 per year, the author would need to make around $100,000 to make the same amount of money. Nothing more, nothing less.
I'm talking about the average novel author's income. You're broadening the scope a lot more.... And the average programmer wasn't unemployed. At the peak of the crash, the Silicon Valley still had a lower unemployment rate than it does now, which while nearly double the national average at the time, was still only around nine percent.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
They are not selling books. They are selling executions of the Copy command. It is ridiculous to think that an e-book should be priced the same as an actual book
One day they will wise up and realize that their profession is one of many that will no longer be profitable in the traditional sense because of the effect technology has had on the field.
One day, people will create art simply to express themselves and not just to make money.
The problem with these is a lot of them skip the Editor's desk, and it shows.
Yes we should go to a system where the editor is listed on the cover, so that people could track famous editors as a judgement of quality! Then, for instance, Lester Del Rey, or Jim Baen could have their names on the books they oversee the editing for . . . So as not to overdo it, we could make the names smaller, perhaps in a symbol or imprint...
Tolkien had another profession -- he was a college professor.
-- Alastair
Possibly. But that's leaving out the retail fee (Amazon gets their cut), Cover Design, Editing . . . which all comes out before the author gets their cut. So then if the author is extremely lucky they might get half? $4500 say... which is pretty low, really. Certainly well below minimum wage.
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?
Self-published eBook authors also mostly use print-on-demand services, which means that they don't have the cost of printing hanging over their heads as a sunk cost. I'm talking about anyone considering doing traditional print publishing, not POD.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I feel obliged to point out that actually, the primary reason I don't go to amusement parks (or even movies, much) is that the enjoyment hours per dollar is way too low compared to books. Although this CAN be ameliorated by reading while in line for a roller coaster....
Here is where you get statistics wrong. The minority of books for you are readable. However, for the crowd the majority of books are readable. But because of word of mouth and pin holing information flow the crowd has determined a minority of books are readable or even accessible.
No, the majority of $0.99 ebooks are somewhere between unreadable and barely readable. The vast majority of free ebooks really are unreadable; probably worse than what you'd find on fanfiction.net, since at least the fan fiction starts with a competent setting and characters.
Tolkein had a day job.
The days where anyone can make a living off their work is relic of the 20th century.
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I think they made a mistake in doing it when people were going to work.
That's a bad time. Sleepy grumpy people rushing to work because they don't plan to waste any time on the way, and don't want to arrive early. Of course they won't want to arrive late either. The guy leaning against the wall was probably unemployed.
I have ocassionally passed near musicians in the underground that sounded very good, but still decided not to stop either because I was going to work, or because I couldn't wait to get home.
He should have played in a large public park or some such place, where people really can afford to stop and listen.
You'd lose that bet. See this post.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Or James joyce
If you can convince a publisher to grant you and advance on the book...
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. What makes this particularly nasty is if your first book didn't sell all that well, it is highly unlikely that the publisher will want your second book. And just to add insult to injury, they probably won't release the rights to your first book until you have paid them back in full. At this point, you either start flipping burgers to survive or find a family member or friend who is willing to support you until you can get that second book out.
Most publishers are experienced enough where they can well judge the sales potential of a book. The advance is well-calculated so when the book reaches the end of its useful run life (again, about three years), the amount made is pretty much equal to the original advance. It really isn't until the second or third book that an author actually starts making money on his/her craft. Hopefully, that author can get their second book out before the first book stops being printed and begin actually making money.
Whew! This water sure is cold!
A solution would be to make the first chapter free and the full book $5.
Which is why most sites -- Amazon, Smashwords, B&N -- do offer free sample downloads (typically 10-20%, publisher can override). They also offer refunds.
-- Alastair
Nobody said it should cost three times what the paperback costs. I said it made sense for it to cost a bit more.
Besides, as I've said previously, those eBook sales also take money away from the paper sales, which, being a sunk cost, must be made up for. Electronic sales don't take away the costs of the printed copy; they compound it.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The patronage model certainly wasn't perfect, and ours isn't either, but I think this underscores the way that culture and economics influence the way things get made. It used to be fashionable for the rich/powerful to be patrons of various causes - you look at composers, authors, scientists, artists, pretty much any of the things that might enrich life without being immediately and obviously profitable - but that no longer seems to be the case. You used to have a pet scientist to show off to your rich friends, but that disappeared eventually for some reason. What are the rich spending their money on now, and why don't they spend their money on this kind of stuff?
I'm not sure if you blame capitalism or postmodernity or whatever, but the thing is we don't really have any kind of morality that we even pay lipservice to anymore. During the Victorian era there was at least this kind of moral pressure for the rich to benevolently devote their resources to further social and artistic causes. Part of it came from peer groups, etc. And I suppose you could argue that the Prius-owning green movement is an example of that at least among wealthy celebrities. You also see hospitals and symphonies that are supported partly by wealthy donors. But, I personally don't think it would be a bad thing to bring this sense of upper class obligation back. Or really, any class obligation. It's obnoxious for the wealthy to act morally superior (patronizing, perhaps?) but they can feel however they want as long as they support shit that needs to happen. I, for one, welcome our patronizing overlords!
Thats what i want. i want to participate in financing books from the writers i want in the direction i want. depending on what he is working on, i may give 1 bucks or 100 bucks. that's how it should be.
Read radical news here
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
So the model would be we all get to read what the "Patron" wants to see written? Expect lots of biographies of rich people.
Every commercial author* I've ever met wants millions, would be okay with comfortable, would settle for livable and abhors penniless. They are entrepreneurs. They take risk and want reward.
Programmers do not take those types of risks.** They seek steady employment. Just like, say, a technical writer. Any programmer who expects to make millions working for someone else is delusional unless he plans on making those millions by investing that steady income and spending wisely.
I haven't met too many people who think they are *entitled* to those millions. Those folks that do tend to be abject failures because the fault lies with the system and not with them. They have no incentive to improve. They don't even seem to love the art. <snobbery>One hesitates to even call them authors.</snobbery>
*People who seek to make money through selling published works.
**I'm not talking about entrepreneurs who use their programming skills.
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.
I've bought plenty of books that cost me 99p. I've refused point blank to pay £13 for an ebook since that is just taking the piss. The author of the £13 book did not get my money, however the dozen or so authors that sold me their book at 99p did. Some of the books were a bit crap and some of it was really good. I later borrowed the £13 book from a friend and although it was pretty good, it wasn't any better than the best of the 99p lot. Publishers are retarded if they think they can get away with the hardback first paperback later scam with ebooks.
> 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!
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.
If you're lucky. Books don't cost hundreds of millions to write though so your analogy falls down a bit.
George R R Martin by any chance?
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 their stuff. They could publish on toilet tissue and people would buy it.
What the pulp media provides is a very valuable filter for discovering new authors that don't suck. If I have to look through a hundred first chapters of books before concluding that they are poorly written crap (or worse, don't conclude it until I've already paid for it and gotten a quarter of the way through without discovering much of a plot), then you've just wasted my time. There's an actual financial value in being able to have somebody else do that for me.
Case in point, I recently stumbled across a series of books at Border's during their 50% off store closing sale. I bought what turned out to be all but one of the series, knowing nothing about the author, and having done nothing but read the short snippet from the inside of the front cover on a couple of them. I felt comfortable doing that because I knew there was no way a really bad writer could possibly get seven books published through a major publishing house.
The publishers provide one consistent voice, one relatively consistent opinion on what is and is not good writing, and although I'm sure I could find lots of good writing that isn't published through a major publishing house, I know that everything that does get published through those channels meets at least a certain minimum quality standard.
You don't get that with eBooks. Even to the extent that Amazon and other services provide product reviews, the reviews are all over the map, even for books and movies that I enjoy. Really, what you need is a way of asking Amazon to show me reviews written by people whose reviews on products have been similar to my reviews, and who have purchased similar types of products. And even then, it won't be as good as having a consistent set of reviewers whose opinions you trust.
In short, for new authors, there will always be a major advantage to getting published through a properly refereed channel. And although it is largely unimportant whether that channel is a major print publisher or some other entity, for now, those print publishers exist and fill that need.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Shameless plug: One way to do interact with your readers is to work on a shared free and open Setting, such as Theonosis: http://theonosis.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page This way you and your readers can work together to develop a more richly detailed setting than you could ever do on your own.
I heard a statistic recently on a podcast. It said that in the year 1450 A.D. (i.e. before copyright), there were a total of 100 new books published. Only 100 books. Yeah, the patronage system works great.
And self-published authors use print-on-demand, which means that they don't have the sunk cost of printing. You're talking about different authors with different requirements here, so of course they price things differently....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Amazon already requires this as a condition of publishing your book on the Kindle. They make the first 10% of any book available as a free download. When you get to the end of that 10%, there's a link to buy the complete book. If you don't want to buy it, just delete the sample. Smashwords does the same, but allow the author to say how much of the book he wants to offer as a free sample. I presume other bookshops have a similar arrangement, but I haven't bought anything from them.
This feature probably needs to be more heavily promoted... I saw a review of The Help by Kathryn Stockett that amounted to, "The Southern dialect made the book too hard to read. If I'd known about it, I wouldn't have bought the book." The Southern dialect is readily apparent from the first page (or screen), so this person could easily have saved their money...
Just another wannabe fantasy novelist...
If you sell a million copies of a book, chances are very good that you can get a much higher percentage of the profits on the *next* book. The real problem that most authors face is that no one has any idea who they are. I've happily paid up to $20 for a pre-release copy of an ebook from an author that I enjoy in a series that I just *had* to finish. However, I started that series with a free ebook on Baen's website (The Belisaurius Series, in case you are interested).
Writing is no different from any other profession. While skill and talent are important, marketing trumps almost everything. Giving away a sample at a discount is one of the oldest tricks in the marketing play book.
Sure if you only want to see books like Harry Potter and twilight books. A lot of quality books don't sell near 1 million copies.
I paid that much for an ebook. If something is quality and DRM free (if it's an ebook) then why isn't it worth £13? Amazing how so many people bitch about the lack of jobs or rate of pay and then feel paying more than a £1 for anything is fucking scandalous.
I know Justin Bieber exists but that certainly doesn't mean I like him or have paid for any of his works.
Amazon may be nice for the author but then the customer gets DRM and is limited on where they can view the file.
I have no problem paying a REASONABLE PRICE for a book. $25.99 for an Advnaced SQL book? sure. $75.99 for that same one? no way in hell.
Latest novel from my favorite author? I'll pay $3.00 less than paperback price for it on ebook format if it's DRM free so I can give it to a friend when I am done reading it. $3.00 less for a version that I cant give away when I am done? Screw that.
I have several friends that we all loan or trade books, and everyone I have talked to has said, "no lending or trading of ebooks is a FAIL"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You don't want the patronage system. It will not work.
What will work is shifting more of the profits from sales to the author. This shouldn't be a problem for distributors since their costs at this point are VERY low.
The problem is that we only have a few distributors that are competent in this field. Amazon dominates books and Apple is dominating music.
That needs to open up so there are many venders for both. That will create the price competition required to make this relevant.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Replying again because I forgot to address this point. I think you're failing to note that this only applies to already-successful authors.
No, I was specifically talking about already-successful writers; they're the publishing industry's cash cows, and without them all those New York offices will be rather hard to pay for.
Until recently those writers had nowhere else to go, now they can self-publish their laundry lists on Amazon and make 70% royalties instead of 15%. The smarter ones are already comparing how much money they can make in the two markets, the dumber ones will take a while to realise how much trade publishing is costing them.
If you sell a million copies of a book, chances are very good that you can get a much higher percentage of the profits on the *next* book.
Not if you're selling them on Amazon for $0.99. You get $0.35 per sale, take it or leave it.
"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 clue as to what free ebooks were available you might know what you are talking about.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Amazon may be nice for the author but then the customer gets DRM and is limited on where they can view the file.
Most $0.99 ebooks don't have DRM. It's kind of silly when you're practically giving the book away in the first place.
You're comparing apples and oranges. The cinema's costs are channel costs, which are directly comparable to the percentage that book resellers charge (e.g. Amazon selling an eBook to a reader). Those costs aren't as small as you think.
For a $1.00 eBook, VISA takes about 25–30 cents as a transaction fee, plus 2–3 percent, so almost a third of that goes directly to the credit card processor. This becomes a bigger and bigger problem as the size of the transaction gets smaller. For a $10 eBook, the processing fee ends up being around 6%. For a $0.50 eBook, the processing fee is about 63%
Similarly, servers require power and take up space. A lot of space. Amazon as of two years ago was estimated to have somewhere around 40,000 servers. That's on the order of 35 gigawatt hours of power consumption on the low side, which even at a low rate of ten cents per kWh is still $3.5 million dollars annually—not exactly chump change. And that's not counting leasing building space, network connections, paying administrators to fix things when they break, and so on. Yes, it's divided up among a lot of transactions, but it's still a huge infrastructure cost, and more importantly, most of those costs scale roughly linearly according to peak demand, so you don't get a huge cost savings by increasing volume.
The cost to upload the book, by contrast, is negligible, as is the cost of making the actual print and mailing it to a movie theater. That's so small that it gets lost in the noise.
BTW, movies cost so much to make almost entirely due to advertising costs. You can make a great movie on HDV or similar for a few thousand in gear, a couple hundred bucks in tapes, plus ten or fifteen bucks an hour to hire talent from your local college drama department. What the multi-million dollar talent contracts bring in is not better quality, but rather name recognition and the automatic crowd appeal that comes from that recognition. In other words, advertising.
Don't make the mistake of conflating that high production cost with any inherent costs of the production itself. Book advertising could be just as expensive if you wanted it to be. The only reason no company does this is that book publishers sell a much smaller number of units on average, and thus can't distribute such exorbitant advertising costs across enough units to keep the price per unit from being ridiculous. The point is that most of those do not directly contribute to the quality of workmanship; thus, although they may contribute to the cost of a work, they should not contribute to its perceived value.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Maybe, but they're also the ones who demand higher royalties, more travel expenses, more advertising expenses, etc. They're a safe bet, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the industry can't do well without them.
In a way, this is a bit of an "adapt or die" moment for the publishing industry, precisely because they've been too hesitant to take on new talent in the past (because of the cost of print). They're going to have to do more new author acquisitions, as that's the only way they will continue to remain useful and viable.
That said, in a way, I think that publishers also see electronic publishing as a great way of doing just that. By accepting more new authors and taking advantage of electronic publishing and print-on-demand services (but under their imprint), they can maintain smaller inventories (thus mitigating the costs of accepting more works) while still providing a useful filtering service. Thus, I see the long-term role of publishers as more of a highly selective advertising and finishing service... and in a way, this is what they have always done.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
News flash. Publish as ebook only to begin with. then go to the paperback based on ebook sales numbers. before you pay for printing and logistics.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm not saying you should pay more for an ebook or that it should even have DRM. I think it's highly unlikely you will get rid of DRM if people want $1 books.
And yes I would say $3.00 less for an ebook is reasonable. In my mind O'Reilly get it right. The ebook is typically $10 less, you get it in a number of formats and at least the PDF is 100% DRM free (I've not used the other formats so I can't say if they're DRM free), you get free updates to the next edition and if you buy the physical book you get the ebook for $5.00.
I personally think more publishers should follow that model and forget the $1 a book model. I think the article quite rightly points out the $0.99 price is so attractive now because it's not the norm. But when it's the norm you no longer stand out and no one will value your product. As it also points out it can be cheaper than a candy bar. No one values anything at that price and I think it will actually increase piracy because people won't value the product and in their mind the author only loses out on $0.99 not $20.00 so it's easier not to feel guilty.
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
Whew! This water sure is cold!
VISA takes about 25â"30 cents as a transaction fee, plus 2â"3 percent, so almost a third of that goes directly to the credit card processor.
This can be reduced by the store offering me a discount (say 10%, that is, less than the difference between the transaction fee for 10x$1 ebooks and 1x$10 ebook) if I buy their "points" (no less than $10 at a time) which can later be used to buy ebooks. One larger transaction means lower fees.
Similarly, servers require power and take up space.
But vastly less space than it would require to store the printed books in enough quantities. Also, there is no shipping to/from the store required. I am also sure that Amazon sells not only ebooks, so those 40k servers are used for other things too. ebooks do not require a lot of disk space. I could probably store quite a lot of them on a 1TB hard drive in one server. OK, two for redundancy. If the books are not popular then my two servers would be enough. If they are so popular that the two servers cannot handle the load, then most likely I am making enough money for more servers.
What the multi-million dollar talent contracts bring in is not better quality, but rather name recognition and the automatic crowd appeal that comes from that recognition.
CGI also costs a lot. Whether you like it or not, movies with good effects (even those that are pretty much all special effects) are popular. Advertising is important too.
And yes, I would be willing to pay more to see a movie that cost $100M than one that cost $10k to produce. The same way I pay for some physical item made in China less than I would pay for a similar item made in, say, EU or Japan. If it was cheaper for you to make, then do not expect me to pay as much as I would pay for something that took more money to make.
The point is that most of those do not directly contribute to the quality of workmanship; thus, although they may contribute to the cost of a work, they should not contribute to its perceived value.
Of course, just paying for advertising (TV, radio etc) does not make the item worth more.
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.
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.
Are you sure you can compare deep narrow search (google) with wide shallow ones (pre-google) ? I fail to see the logic step between this and the long tail issue.
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.
Any book written over 7 years ago is likely far out of date with respect to the economics of the Internet.
Historically, gatekeepers like book publishers, record companies, and movie studios were the only way to get content widely distributed. This meant that if you did not fit the mold of what those gatekeepers were looking for, your content would never be consumed by more than a few people.
Today, those gatekeepers are becoming less and less meaningful, as "self-publishing" on the Internet can allow someone to reach a large enough audience to have their content be found by enough people who like it to make even small amounts of money per consumer add up to a reasonable paycheck. Yes, you are still going to have the "Angry Birds"/Beatles effect, where there are huge hits that skew the average, and you will have content that will be ignored. But, you no longer need to be able to convince some big company executive that your content will appeal to millions of people just to get it produced and available for 99% of people to reject (because all but the biggest "hits" are still only consumed by a tiny fraction of the population). With 7 billion people in the world, having 5% of people in the world consume your content means that you are more popular than Avatar, which only had about 3% or so people consume it, and that gave it over $2 billion in box office. On the other hand, having 100,000 fans (meaning 99.9986% of the world doesn't care about your content) can give you a nice solid living.
Or something like. Instead of writing for a publisher and hoping you get sales, put up a chapter and get funded by your readers to finish it. You get marketing, enough money to live on and maybe a hot seller. If you don't know how to get the word out hire a PR person to help and make the funding goal enough to include their fees.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Please read the book, "Why Are Artists Poor" from Amazon.
Paperback price: $32.58
Kindle Edition: $29.32
Assuming that book sells much, there's one artist who certainly isn't poor. Or maybe that author is a "researcher" and not an artist.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Most decent authors i know put out far more than one book every 5-10 years. A lot of authors have a regular day job and still manage to put out at least one book every 5-10 years. (In fact i've heard from more than one author who quit their day job so they'd have more time to write and then found they actually had a harder time focusing on writing when it was their "real" job.)
And on top of that, on the lower end of the scale $40,000 post-taxes per year is nothing to sneer at. I think i make something around that after taxes and yet _somehow_ i manage to survive in California. (Note to the sarcasm impaired, it's actually pretty damn easy if you've got even moderate money management skills.) One can get by for less than that in a lot of areas of the US. I don't actually know the numbers but i wouldn't be surprised if someone could get by on $20,000 post-taxes per year in some areas of the mid-west without a second job if they were willing to, er, work at it.
So if you can't write more than one book every 5-10 years then either being an author ought to be your lifelong dream that you're willing to sacrifice for, or you really need to find a job that you're better at.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Oh, absolutely. Even taking into account the need for lots of servers distributed around the world for availability and performance reasons, it still costs a lot less than print. My best guess is somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty or sixty cents per transaction for a large company like Amazon after you factor in the credit card fees, network bandwidth, server costs, facilities, maintenance, etc.
That's assuming files on the order of 0-5 megabytes and priced at a dollar. The costs go up as the size and/or price go up, so for a ten dollar book, it's more like a buck ten, and for a $100 math textbook that's 200 megabytes in size because of all the figures, it's probably at least six or seven dollars, and maybe as high as fifteen.
I was deliberately ignoring special effects movies. You're right, of course, but that affects a fairly small percentage of movies to any significant degree. (Admittedly, the highest grossing movies, but still....) More importantly, those costs are fairly directly reflected in the price of the product when compared with movies that don't have lots of SFX. Those aren't usually $5–10 movies until they've been out for a decade or more, and thus aren't really in the same price class as books unless you're buying a hardcover at full retail price right after its release.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You'll saturate the market, and then you will have no hope of recouping your printing costs because everyone who wants the book will already have given up and bought the electronic edition. I really don't think that will work.
Now what will work is for an author to release his or her first book electronically, then if it does well, release the sequel in print, and simultaneously re-release the first book in print. But a standalone book released electronically first? That sounds like a recipe for going broke.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
But why exactly is pre-printing thousands of copies a requirement for anybody in this day and age? If ebooks drive that much sales from print, why not just print less, or move to wider-scale print-on-demand? We've seen it before on Slashdot, the idea of bookstores being nothing more than fronts for print-on-demand shops. Obviously, they could stock a certain number of pre-printed copies of popular titles, but the old model of printing lots of copies at once on large centralized presses has been eclipsed by miniaturization and digital presses, not just the Internet. I think that anyone making major business decisions based on the limitations of an outmoded supply chain needs to take a serious look at where to start changing things.
I live in Australia, the other night I tried to find a digital copy of a couple of different books by Robert Kiyosaki. I have no issue with paying. I check apple's ibook store, amazons store, and a number of other random named ebook stores and guess what... I LIVE IN AUSTRALIA AND THEY ARENT LICENCED TO SELL THEM TO MY AREA!!!!! So what did I do, I downloaded a free pdf copy and converted it to epub to put on my iphone and ipad...
If they want to make money, the bloody laws make it too hard for them to sell, they need to stop complaining about illegal downloads and stop pissing people off by restricting the sale in their country!!!!!
Who do I have to kill!
They're going to have to do more new author acquisitions, as that's the only way they will continue to remain useful and viable.
That said, in a way, I think that publishers also see electronic publishing as a great way of doing just that. By accepting more new authors and taking advantage of electronic publishing and print-on-demand services (but under their imprint), they can maintain smaller inventories (thus mitigating the costs of accepting more works) while still providing a useful filtering service. Thus, I see the long-term role of publishers as more of a highly selective advertising and finishing service... and in a way, this is what they have always done.
Hear hear. This is exactly what I was thinking in my reply to your comment just above. I think that if publishing houses can adapt, they will make themselves much more relevant in the 21st century than, say, the music labels (who appear to have forgotten that they are a value-added service, not a troll under the bridge to stardom). Editorial services in particular will never become obsolete (though they may be neglected, at the writer's peril).
I get by just fine on less than $15,000, so yes, financial difficulties usually are the result of actual choices, rather than circumstances beyond one's control.
The iPhone game market caused the same race-to-the-bottom that appears to have happened for eBooks. Game developers make an median of $3000 per iPhone game, clearly not enough to sustain anyone but development teams who live in Tadjikistan. Oversupply made iPhone games a bloodbath, and it looks like it's the same for eBooks (but, I assume, far worse because it's easier to write a median quality book than a median quality iPhone game).
CEO vs Author isn't an apples to apples comparison. The CEO is making 35% of the profit from the entire company. The author is making 35% of the profit from his own work. The author poured blood, sweat and tears (presumably) into that book, while chances are the CEO waltzed in, slashed jobs, "raised quarterly revenues" and waltzed out with a fat ass check.
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
Here's the deal. I have thousands of dead tree books. I have therefore already paid to license the content.
For $1 a book, I would buy a digital copy of all of my physical books. The convenience would be well worth it to me, and since I've already licensed the content I would expect the marginal cost to be something like a buck. After all, I've already paid for the author's and editor's efforts, so we are talking about pure conversion and digital distribution.
I suspect that with a good marketing campaign, tens of millions of consumers could be convinced to a similar view. Spending another $1 on something they already have is a good idea. Conversely, most people won't spend $10 to $20 for an e-copy of a novel they already bought. Often they end up in the darknets downloading illegal, poor quality rip-offs.
The potential income for publishers and authors is staggering. But by clinging to an outdated business model, they turn their noses up at these $billions of income. Then they cry poor like 21st century buggy whip manufacturers.
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.
No, they're lighting cigars with the money you're paying for energy, internet and taxes. Especially taxes. Hell, the Congress wipes their ass with our money and then pays for booze, blow and bitches with whatever's left.
The entertainment industries are small fries compared to the real fat cats.
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
Amongst the independent publishers the 99c -is- the norm, in fact now a lot of people are ditching it and going back to a sane pricing model. The end result now is that many series writers will put the first book (or two) at 99c as a bit of a loss leader and then put the rest at $2.99~$3.99.
What REALLY burns at 99c (well, below $2.99) is that Amazon gives you only 35% cut, but at $2.99+ you get 70%.
I've seen a lot of writers have good success at 99c but it runs out after about 6 months; then you're left high and dry until you can score another success - having the first success is no guarantee that your next book will be as popular (though you will have a certain degree of market following at least).
IAAIWP - I am an independent writer-publisher
By definition, the value of a product to a consumer is based on the benefit that the consumer gets from it. Hours of enjoyment is a good metric for that. It's not the only metric, but it's a pretty good one. Nor am I saying that price should necessarily be based on the value to the consumer.
What I'm saying is that when price and perceived value differ radically, as is the case if you price a book that will get you many, many hours of enjoyment at the same $0.99 price as a three minute song, you've probably underpriced yourself so badly that people will assume your product is junk.
BTW, the county fair might give you a whole day of entertainment if you're easily amused or are a kid. For everybody else, it's usually good for an hour or two at best. Thus, the question of its relative value depends a lot on your perspective. More importantly, though, because it is so popular for kids, it has to be priced cheaply, as you have to buy tickets for the entire family, not just one ticket for everybody. That automatically lowers how much you can usefully get for it.
And yes, movies (at least in theaters, and new releases) are way overpriced.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It's not, but it is a requirement if you want a quality paper copy that will last for more than a few readings. There are very few print-on-demand hardcover houses, and AFAIK, none of them do traditional hardcover (stitched signature) binding. Instead, they do plain old perfect binding (fold and glue), which means that they are not significantly more robust than a paperback copy. A few of them will do saddle-stapled bindings, but that's really not much better.
Thus, if a paperback is good enough, then there's no need for pre-printed books. If you want the quality and robustness of a hardcover, it's not currently possible with POD to the best of my knowledge.
Also, I'm not aware of any POD houses that will do full color interiors. There might be some, but all the houses I've looked at are limited to black and white interiors with full-color covers. For novels, that doesn't matter. For photo tour books, it's kind of a show stopper.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
> 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 belief in the "fat-cat-edness" of those you don't have any first-hand experience with is probably as accurate as those foreigners who *know* that every American is a fat-cat.
for a $100 math textbook that's 200 megabytes in size because of all the figures, it's probably at least six or seven dollars, and maybe as high as fifteen.
Assuming that 5% is a transaction fee, that means that to serve 200MB costs $1-2. That's in the order of what my cellphone provider charges me if I go over the monthly cap (yes, my cell connection is capped because I do not use it a lot). With my wired connection I upload about 22TB/month, so, for me that costs ~$130 (internet connection + electricity for those servers), but for a company like Amazon it would cost at least $120k?
And whatever costs are proportional to the price (like the transaction fee), they do down with the price too.
It may even benefit authors and media producers to go the kickstarter route. Basically give a teaser of your work, or release one work, then get fans to donate for future works.
Not sure where you got five percent. There's the credit card transaction fee, which is usually about 20-30 cents plus about 3%. Then depending on the size of the book, you have to add the data throughput and the cost of keeping copies continuously accessible on high-availability, high speed storage.
Most folks don't know exactly what the latter costs, and nobody who does know can say, so all I have to go on are rumors and innuendo, which suggest that it's somewhere between twenty and fifty cents to host a 3-5 megabyte download, assuming that it gets a reasonable download rate. So I'm wild-assed guessing based on that, and scaling up to a much larger file size.
The point is that it's not just bandwidth. The data has to be on spinning storage, and that spinning storage has to be continuously online and accessible, with multiple backups continuously online and accessible, with RAID setups, offline backups, hot swap failover servers, backup power generators, backup network links, and if it's a high volume download, you'll also need to factor in the cost of distributing the data via Akamai to lots of local data centers around the world. The data connection is the tip of the iceberg when you're talking about an operation of Amazon's size.
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In a marketplace with thousands of books selling for $0.99, the book which sells for $4.99 or more stands out. If I was looking at two books on the same topic, and one was dirt cheap while the other was priced higher but still reasonable, my immediate impression is that the more expensive book is of higher quality. And if the book is good, if the content is valuable, then I will gladly pay for what it's worth.
The race to the bottom in prices is sad on all levels. I refuse to believe "people refuse to pay more than $0.99 for an app/book/song/whatever"; I've done it many times and did not regret it, and the creator was compensated more fairly in my opinion. Creators just need to grow some balls about their work and sell it for what they really think it's worth and not be afraid they need to give it away to get people to notice it. Nobody will buy it just for being cheap when everything is already cheap.
Even if I'm wrong, even if you decide to sell your work for a higher price and therefore suffer lower profit as a result, the alternative looks a lot worse. In the long run, you devalue your entire medium until you won't be able to make a dime no matter how low you price it.
Just my opinion. I could be wrong.
... try a book!
You can find all sorts of paperbacks in used book stores with cigarette ads and what not stuck in the middle of the book. If anything like patronage ever becomes a force in publishing, I'd bet that's the way it will happen. With ebooks, the advertising possibilities are horrifying.
Not sure where you got five percent.
Took a guess.
Most folks don't know exactly what the latter costs, and nobody who does know can say, so all I have to go on are rumors and innuendo, which suggest that it's somewhere between twenty and fifty cents to host a 3-5 megabyte download, assuming that it gets a reasonable download rat
20-50 cents for one file or per download? I can believe that it's 50 cents for one file for some time (more than a month), but not per download. Youtube hosts a lot of big video files and has to upload them at a certain minimum speed - it doesn't really matter if the 5MB ebook takes 1 or 20 seconds to download, but it matters when the streaming video stalls. It cannot cost even 20 cents for a 5MB download (not file).
Also, how much space wold ebooks use anyway? 10-20TB? That should not be that a big problem to distribute. And once you sent the initial books, then you only have to send the new additions, that should not take up a lot of space.
And yes, availability - sure, that costs a lot, but it should not cost that lot. If it does, just implement something like a distributed computing project (distributed uploading, something similar to bittorrent) and pay the participants 1 cent per 10MB uploaded (if it really costs 20-50 cents to send me the 5MB ebook I bought). I am sure a lot of people would jump at the opportunity and the network would be at least as stable as their own is now.
HG Wells entire works are FREE.
Shakespeare's works are completely FREE
Actually in a some parts of the world H.G. Wells works are not out of copyright yet, he died in 1946 so life plus 70 years equals 2016.
And Shakespeare, think of all the people cheating his grandmothers sisters offspring out of their due to his works being freely available, I mean if your 50*great uncle was successful why should you have to work? (sarcasm)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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 clue as to what free ebooks were available you might know what you are talking about.
As one who has a clue about Gutenberg, and had it long before there were iPad/Kindle/Nook/etc. devices, I agree. That said, since there are such great writers, you will not catch me wasting my time browsing the free dreck that people put out nowadays. Years ago I spotted on usenet the following lament: "The plus side of advances in digital recording is that anybody can record an album. The down side is that everybody is doing so." We can agree that the filtering mechanisms of the past were imperfect, but to turn off filtering entirely is not an improvement in my eyes. Go -- read your free modern dreck. I shall stick with the old stuff, which is truly beautiful thoughtful work, and does not deserve to be buried by what is being written today.
As an addendum, GGP is correct. The majority of ebooks are dreck. The majority of print books are also dreck. Consider any of the books directed at mid-level executives. You can identify them by their titles having semicolons with explanatory subtitles. Most of these would be great as pamphlets; they did not deserve to be expanded into 128-page books (or longer). But because there is no major pamphlet publishing industry, they say, "Make a book out of it," and then the few salient worthwhile points are covered in junk. So it is not merely ebooks, but rather the current expansion of publishing.
Now I will sit back and await an offer to write a book expounding on the declines in the publishing industry, which will appear in every Hudson News (bookstore chain seen mostly in major airports, for those of you not familiar) in America.
An alternative to getting money from just one patron would be to use the awesome power of the intertubes and receive patronage from many fans worldwide. See for example the <plug> Kickstarter project by Tobias Buckell(author of "Crystal Rain","Sly Mongoose" and more) for his newest novel. He offers various levels of "patronage" in correspondence with the money one can donate. This largely avoids the problem of a patron having undue inflience on a work of art (personally I wouldn't consider changing a characters name according to the wishes of a donor an undue influence).
The downside of this model is that it would be hard for new authors without an existing fanbase to employ.
I'll gladly pay, say, $200/year, and I can read all the books I want.
You know, that's an amazing idea. Except I would take it one step further: I would set up groups in municipalities, have them acquire books, shelving, and a building, and then have them "stream" the books locally by lending them *for free*. I haven't figured out what to name such an institution, though.
Eh, who am I kidding? Such a place would get so many cease and desist letters from copyright holders the idea would never work. Hell, it probably infringes on some business process patent anyway.
Most of the latter are unreadable[1], as anyone who's done Eng Lit at school will testify.
However I suspect that the grandparent, though he didn't explicitly say so, was referring to recent works and not the classics.
[1] Plays were meant to be performed - in the original Klingon.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Though until very recently they effectively were the same thing. A vanity publisher is one who charges the author to publish their book. Amazon doesn't do so for ebooks (though Barnes and Noble does).
Ok 9,990 dollars for a book as an income? That is a joke!
That is more than most people make from a book. There's a reason that the world isn't full of writers - it's not a very profitable profession. If you're not in the top 1,000, then you're very unlikely to see that much, especially in fiction. Getting 10,000 to pay full paperback price for a book is very difficult, and the original author is luck to see $1 from each sale in the traditional publishing model.
Yes, before you ask, a significant fraction of my income does derive from book sales.
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On top of that an ebook:
1. You don't have to work in print runs of 10,000 or so. So your entire catalog can be ready for sale. Way too often I've tried to find an 'out of print' book.
2. Publishers don't make a lot of money off a paper book. Printing, and shipping and commissions to the bookstore take a huge chunk of the price.
Anyway, I'm willing to pay 30% of the paper price for an ebook.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
I don't know what plannet are you from, but at this gravity weel you can hire quite a number of editors and graphic artits with 600k dollars.
I also don't know where do you get any vague "everyone is getting rich but me" from my post. I don't think I left anything vague there, and well, nothing there has no relation with me. But I admit you may speek a slightly different english there where 600k for editing a book is nearly no money at all.
Rethinking email
If only the editing on ebooks from major publishers like Baen or Del Rey didn't also have terrible editing that looks like the took an edited book and ran it through OCR and posted the result also.
Sorry to misinterpret you.
Well, there is some party getting way too much money here.
I felt "some party" was pretty vague, but now I assume you mean Amazon. (I was confused by your "everybody else".)
While it pains me to defend Amazon, let me point out they spend billions in infrastructure, billions on computing resources, and charge nothing for e-publishing the countless millions of books that sell between 1-2 copies.
Amazon is doing alright, but anyone who thinks that Amazon is getting massively rich on e-books is dreaming in technicolor.
Sorry, the attitude I noted is still there. There are dozens of services necessary to *actually* get from author to e-reader, and you can't actually imagine that there's hard-working people making a living (and if they're very lucky, a decent living) behind each of those services. Sorry, but there's no one getting way too much money here.
(I might actually agree with you if Amazon started charging a hundred dollars a book to publish it, which would cover their fixed costs nicely. However, they've chosen to have the million best seller (which is probably about 1 e-book in a million) subsidize all the others that they take a (small) bath on.)
Scientific culture has also become a tyranny with regard to publishing books. Anybody involved in academic life and/or research and having organized a scientific Conference is currently feeling it: you cannot publish a proceedings volume or an edited papers collection unless you can convince the publisher that there will be at least xxx copies sold by providing a detailed description of the target audience and projected sales figures. On the other hand, there are plenty of debatable quality science TV shows hosted by superstar scientists. I hope I'm not the only one firmly believing that in the 21st century science has become fully Bieberized and unless you have patrons with real cohones, you cannot really sustain or run a Tevatron.
Please read the book, "Why Are Artists Poor" from Amazon.
Or you could be like most people and download the torrent and get a whole pile of books from that publisher too.
I wrote a book about using open-source software last year. It's complicated enough reading that a decent number of people prefer a paper copy. And the Kindle format is worthwhile for people with one of those readers to by. But by far the most popular format is "illegal PDF e-book", even though it only costs $11, worst case (when no promotions are active) for a legal one.
I'm sure that had nothing to due with the high cost of printing and the low literacy rate...
Ok, granted. The energy and internet (i.e ISP) industries are not necessarily run by greedy fat-cats. I do however note that you chose to ignore the third "industry", namely the spoiled shits in Congress. I suppose I could take that as agreement?
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
When the closest thing to a global language was Latin. A time when most people couldn't read or write.
Quidam tamen nos scribere latine te inconsulta glaeba!
(Trans: Some of us still write in Latin, you inconsiderate clod!)
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Comparing Amazon to YouTube is fundamentally flawed for four reasons:
As for distributed distribution, that can't possibly work if you're relying on smoke-and-mirrors DRM, as everyone would have to be passing around the unencrypted content, or else they would have to all use a single shared key, either of which would make the DRM pathetically trivial to break, and worse, odds are good that folks would also break the encryption on the protocol, at which point their entire collection would become free (as in beer). There are reasons why folks who are selling downloads almost universally prefer centralized control....
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Actually, no.
I have no doubt that waste exists, as I think it exists in every field of human endeavor, but I don't think that government in the North American context is especially worse than the rest. And in fact, I'd say it's pretty hard to get rich in government. Not impossible, but I've known several people who went into business to get rich, yet I've never met a single person who went into politics to get rich. (This talking about young people who are apt to be rather more honest.)
I've only worked in government once for a little while, but honestly, it didn't feel much different. We all worked decently hard, except our pay was somewhat lower.
Again, I find the most vitriolic denunciations of a group/field tend to come from those who have never actually worked with the group or in the field they are denouncing. Now perhaps there's a magical corruption agent, but I suspect it's the usual. If I was actually rubbing shoulders with the group in question, I would find most would be hard working, deserving what they earned, a few would be jerks, and a very few would be actively destructive. That seems to be the way it is everywhere I've been, and I suspect that's how most other people find the world they actually experience.
The main difference is that I extrapolate my personal experiences outwards, and, unfortunately, some others do not.
(Also, I've friends from areas where the government has the properties that Americans often attribute to their government (be it right or left), and sorry, the American government has a *long* way to go. I do worry that over the long run, persistent (somewhat) unwarranted cynicism may prevent anyone who isn't out to enrich themselves from participating in politics, in which case, watch out! You haven't seen *anything* yet.)
However, Youtube holds much more data, because videos take up a lot (especially considering that there are more than one verson of a video - 1080/720/480/360/240 and sometimes even two codecs - WebM and h.264).
As for distributed distribution, that can't possibly work if you're relying on smoke-and-mirrors DRM
Oh right, forgot that :) Though each book could be encrypted with a different key, still,it would be easier to break than it is now.
I still cannot believe that if I buy a 5MB ebook, it costs Amazon 20 cents to just send it to me. I guess a 4GB DVD image would cost $164 and a 500MB movie $20? How does Netflix stay in business? As I recall they provide downloads.
Still, it seems strange to me that providing data has an inverse economy of scale - I can upload 22TB/month for 1000 times less than it would cost a large company to do so. So, in theory I could have something like 800 connections and servers (for redundancy) and some backup generators for the same amount of money. That would be quite reliable.
You're incorrectly implying that a drop in price translates to a drop in profit, and you're incorrectly implying that there is a single business model ideal for all/most authors
That's actually an excellent point. At that price point there is not a whole lot of wiggle room, although I would bet even Amazon would be willing to sweeten the deal on a $0.99 book for an author that had already sold 1 million copies of a $0.99 ebook.
Of course, the easiest way to get a larger percentage of the profits would be to simply charge more for the next book. Baen.com has an whole pile of books that they give away for FREE. It is very common for books these days to be part of a series, and at the very least many readers tend to become fans of a particular writer and purchase everything written by the author. The publishers know that if you like the free samples you are very likely to come back and *buy* more. If you are not an established writer what you really need are fans, not a bigger piece of a microscopic pie.
I have been working on a fantasy series that has gotten some good reviews, but the market is such that there is no real point to even trying to complete it. I was thinking it would be nice if I could write a few chapters and then get honest feedback on what my writing would be worth and then price the book based on review. IE people would go read the first two chapters or so and rate the book based 1. Quality, 2. Plot, 3, and Recommendation level (was it a good read). Then compute based on feedback market conditions and what the Author would like to make on the work a number. (say 100 bucks for one idea book (2 chapters written,) 100,000k for a decent book and 1.2 million dollars value for a fantasy book that is epic. Then the book would go up for bid and people who purchase the book at the "price" get a reservation for a copy when it is completed. Funds are put into escrow and held. When the book is completed it is flagged as completed and held pending meeting x% (determined by the Author) of the price. When he feels like he has made enough (and of course readers have valued this book as well) he releases the book to those who ponied up. The book then gets 2 years of float time (or 4 or whatever the author determines) where it is "for sale" at the agreed price to give the author time to make profit above and beyond the release price. After 2 4 or whatever time the Author determines the book is released to everyone (share and share alike,) but the author still has a copyright on it. This goes towards garnering interest in the next book in the series. The author can set a low and a high range (IE lets say the book is super popular and the algorithm says it should be able to make 100 million and sell for 350 dollars per copy but the author realizes basic economics and actually wants his book to be read so sets a minimum of 5.99 and max of 8.99 for the book. If the market determines the price the book is worth is 3.99 or .99 or .12 then the author knows the community thinks the book sucks and can either go back and revise it and resubmit, practice writing or whatever until he or she gets good enough to garner interest.
I've spent countless hours writing what I think is a decent read (being honest with myself here) and would love to have people read it and make some funds with it, but with the current market throwing so much dirt it is hard to find the gems and hard to figure out how to market a gem, and if it sucks it would be nice to know that too.
This is not very coherent but based on the intelligence level of everyone on this board I have no doubt everyone will get the just of my thoughts and excuse the fact that this was written at 3am while half asleep..
I haven't paid as much attention to Del Rey's e-books, but Baen's e-books have always been of excellent quality. (aside from the ARCs which they admit ahead of time have not gone through final copyedit). I admit the back-list for a lot of publishers ARE OCRed crap, but that's beginning to stop too. Also, I note that the function of an editor is not primarily a pure copyedit.
Ebook prices are NOT falling, I don't know where you are getting that idea. Prices are increasing. Usually they are on par with the physical equivalent. Ebooks of a hardcover book are around $14-15. Ebooks of paperbacks are usually MORE expensive, since the physical book gets a discount and ebooks are rarely discounted.
Book publishers are just as bad (if not worse) than the recording industry.
In hindsight, the numbers I was remembering might have included the credit card processing fees, in which case it's closer to half a cent or a cent per meg. And since I can't remember the source, it's worth taking with a grain of salt.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.