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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?"
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.
Don't worry writers, Jeffery Archer, Dan Brown, and Tom Clancy have been successfully using this AI for years...
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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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
Maybe if nobody is willing to pay for your book it just isn't good enough. Is that such a complex concept?
Read the article. There is the concept of the "anchoring price" which is what people think is a "fair" price. The interesting point is that if the price to produce the product is higher than the anchoring price, the market dies. Even more interesting, is that anchoring price can be quite different from the price that the customer would be willing to pay in the absence of that price. (By the way, it works in both directions. You can get people to pay 2-3 times what they would otherwise pay in the absence of an anchor price, and likewise you can get them to refuse to pay 1/10th of what they would otherwise be willing to pay by setting the anchoring price too low (like free).
This is where the laws of economics, which dictate prices should rise because people want the product, get defeated by the psychology of humans which says, "if the price is higher than the anchor price in my head, I won't buy it even if I would have enjoyed it at a higher price."
There are reams published about how psychology can prevent a transaction in which both sides would be better off, just because of external factors.
So, no, people may *not* be willing to pay for your book, even if they it's good enough - welcome to human beings.
And yes, sorry, reality *is* a complex concept :-)
"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.
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.