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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?"
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.
Yeah, how dare people produce things that people want for pay!
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.
Patronage was cultural tyranny in which those with money controlled what was produced and made sure that it was to their tastes rather than the creator's vision and that the political implications lined up with their (ruling class) interests.
Pop culture is tyranny too, one in which the lowest common denominator determines what crud is dumped onto the masses. Every system has its downside.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
OP rants against the archaic and irrelevant definition of patronage, which may be why he was modded down. Today, with paypal, and a website as a platform, anyone can seek patronage from anyone else. Look at Minecraft for example, it was mostly funded by people who bought an author's promise of a future product. In this modern world where access to ideas and the means to fund them is freer than any moment in history, using cultural tyranny to describe the patronage model is rather ignorant.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
"Rich people should pay to entertain me" is possibly the single greatest populist cause in history! Demand those circuses!
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.
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"
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.
> 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!
"Sorting the wheat from the chaff is now impossible."
yes if you are one of those that must have the new releases! OHHH IT"S NEW GOTTA GOTTA!!!!
If you wait a year, suddenly the good books are obvious and the crap is in the $0.99 bin. I end up look less trendy, and less like a lemming and I end up spending less because I also end up paying for it used. But then I'm evil. Only evil people buy used books.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.