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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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't worry writers, Jeffery Archer, Dan Brown, and Tom Clancy have been successfully using this AI for years...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
A return to serial novels? It's already being done by some writers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_(literature)
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Reality is even stranger than that, with Tom Clancy selling his name as a brand to put on books written by other authors.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Oh my! So many dicks...so little time! HUGLURHLUGHRLUH!
Well, he's been selling it as a brand to put on movies and computer games for decades, so I suppose that's not such a great leap. He's not that rare either. Arthur C. Clarke has 'co-written' a lot of books since the late '80s that are a sketch of an idea by him turned into a complete work by someone else, but a book by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee sells a lot better than a book by Gentry Lee.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Some think that other works that do not have an easy appeal also deserve funding. That is hard to do when all funding is obtained through an idols like method of a popularity contest.
Of course, in traditional publishing and copyright, only popular books make money, which means that publishers that care about money only want to publish books which will be popular. Some publishers don't care about money so much, but they're essentially like the patrons of old.
I really don't see how you would go about making a significant amount of money from a book that was not popular, unless you forced people to buy it, or forced people to pay unpopular authors via the tax system, both of which sound a lot worse than having only popular books be financially successful.
Feel free to offer suggestions.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
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.
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"
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"
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"
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?
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....
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.