But the publishers are as bad as Hollywood when it comes to sequels.
I can tell you that in all but the Left Behind series (I don't know about that), it's the author, not the publisher, that determined the length of the series.
Fiction publishing is still somewhat old fashioned - writers are still telling *their* stories.
Now having said that, publishers are saying "no" to the writer's choices a lot more often. But they're rarely telling the authors what to write.
And to be honest, if the series really is best-selling, maybe the author should actually be trusted to produce what the readers want?:-)
Um, not in the vast majority of fiction (work-for-hire is a different kettle of fish, but not all that common except for works in somebody else's world.). Open up any fiction book to the front piece and notice who the copyright is assigned to.
'm pretty sure hiring an editor for $10k and then self publishing is a far better deal
What?
Unless you are an already established author, the odds are very high that you will make less than 100 sales total via e-pub. Many authors have trouble making 20 sales. (If you already are known and have an audience, then it's a very different deal.)
That's why publishers are important. If you manage to get accepted, not only are you having somebody else put in the $10K (or $20K once you factor editors, typesetters, copy-editors, cover designers, cover artists, warehousing, accounting, etc., etc.) but most importantly of all, you have had a dispassionate third party publicly indicate that they are confident enough that this books will sell that they are willing to invest $20K and think they can get their money back.
That reason, and that reason alone is why bookstores will stock a traditionally published book and won't stock a self-published book, even if the writer were willing to front the $20K themselves.
Note, at $20K, most publishers will lose money on an book by an unknown author, but nobody has found a better method of finding best sellers.
Unless you are talking small press, you're wrong. Getting your books onto bookstore shelves is the *one* service that publishers can provide that you cannot get any other way. As long as bookstores are relevant, publishers will be relevant, because there has to be *some* mechanism that takes the 100,000 titles that are published a month (self-published and traditionally published) and turns it into the 1,000 or so titles that a bookstore can usefully stock.
Very few fiction books from traditional publishers don't make at least a few thousand sales, while the vast majority of self-published books from otherwise unknown authors make two digit sales. That's why most writers are still vying to be traditionally published.
[Note, self-publishing for a known author whose fans are looking for new work is an entirely different ball-game.]
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.)
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.)
Agreed, however, there is are some saving graces for modern authors.
Novelty: The simple fact that something was produced years ago will turn off quite a number of readers, even if the actual words are indistinguishable from what would be written today. Go figure.
Changing industry: What was produced even ten years ago is often quite different from what is in current favor today. Books, like clothing, have fashion, and even if there were, for example, a sweep back to epic fantasy from the vampire/werewolf fantasy of today, I strongly suspect the epic fantasy output of the 1980's would feed dated to the reader of the 2020's.
Filters: The trouble with free often comes unfiltered. If your time is worth $10 and hour, wasting ten hours to find the book that you like is way more expensive than buying it.
So, you are absolutely right, the anchor price could go to free, and then, when people don't actually like the stuff they can get for free, they may well end up giving up reading altogether, rather than pay for something they would enjoy. Certainly that's my nightmare scenario.
> 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.
> Your analysis seems to assume no other promotional efforts other than casting the ebook upon the waters and waiting.
No, for a self-published author with no name recognition, I assume a huge amount of promotion in order to get into the two and low three digit range. Unfortunately, the iron rule holds, there's only a miniscule chance that a self-published author that you have no information upon (like reviews elsewhere) is going to be readable. Readers know this, and for those who value their time, the net value of such a book is *negative*. Readers also know that the amount of promotion, be it blogs or tweets is unrelated to the quality of a book. So, almost everyone I know runs screaming from promotion for self-published books. It's not that they're evil or universally awful, it's simply that the statistics are against it, and there just isn't enough time to even glance at all the self-published titles in a genre in a given month.
So, no, I assume that self-published authors work their backside off trying to promote their books (as can be seen by the fact that walking the SF con dealers rooms can become quite a gauntlet). I just assume (from my experience) that it mostly doesn't work. (As I said, just enough lightning strikes to allow one to believe, but not the thousands of authors a year "making it" necessary to keep the industry healthy.)
Now, if an author is already famous (for some value of famous), then sure, they might pick the book up. In the SF realm, John Scalzi is an example of someone who parlayed 10 years of effort in cultivating a truly interesting and funny web site into a *chance* at success. People were willing to *try* the books because of what they knew of him, but it was the books themselves that allowed him to become successful. Likewise, being friends with reviewers at a big name review site will help - won't get you a good review, but will give you a *chance* at a review. And that's several orders of magnitude better. But again, without personal connections or fame outside the industry, you need really, really, really good luck.
(The only way out of this vicious cycle I can see is if you could pay a site to review your books and they did a good enough review that it was taken seriously by readers. But how long would that last as a business when you rated 95% of the books that paid a few hundred dollars for a review an 'F'?)
> So if readers are spending half as much money on their books, the authors are making twice as much money after cutting out the middlemen at the publisher.
Unless of course, without the middleman, the reader can't determine between which of 10,000 un-gatekeepered books to buy, 98% which aren't terribly good, and thus decides to go play on his Xbox:-)
At least in a real bookstore, if you bought in your favorite genre at random, you probably had a 10%-50% chance of finding something decent (depending on how picky you were), so it was worth your time to try new authors.
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.
> if you self-published the big publishing houses will not touch you.
I have to say that that is no longer true. Big houses are now looking at self-published successes (the very, very few) and offering contracts. Hard to believe, but true.
However, if you've managed to make it as a self-published author, the mathematics is such that you may well make more money as a self-published author.
It should be emphasized, though, that if you haven't already got a fan base, the odds of making a big success (able to earn $30K+/year) as a self published writer are probably 1,000 times smaller than if you get yourself conventionally published. (By eyeballing, I'd say there's an 1 in 20 chance of a conventionally published author being able to make a middle-class career out of writing, and perhaps 1 in 20,000 of an equally talented author but unknown making a career of it - just look at the number of new authors who disappear after 1-3 books - most of them.)
Also, I'd say that there's really only *one* reason that publishers still hold value - they can get you into a real bookstore. The advance is nice, but a presence in a real bookstore is the difference between 1 in 20 and 1 in 20,000.
In the old system, you might have a hundred books a month in your genre make it on to the store shelves, which pretty much guaranteed a few thousand sales. If the book caught the reader's imagination (I won't say "if it's good enough", because "good" (by any metric) and "sells well" are pretty much orthogonal - not opposite, just not related), then word of mouth spread and you could gradually build your audience, if the publisher kept publishing you.
In the e-world, if you are unknown, you are competing against 10,000 books a month (no gate-keepers now!). Unfortunately, probably perhaps 200 or 300 of those books are "publishable" by the old standards, which means that most readers won't touch a book from an author they've never heard of, not for 0.99, and in fact not for free. After all, time is precious, and if there's was a, say, 30% of liking an unknown book, with e-books, it's now probably a 0.6% chance.
Most e-books from an unknown author probably make double digit sales, if that. And that, unfortunately, is not likely to start the ball rolling, even if it has "what it takes" to make it big.
Now of course, you *can* have lightning strike. But when the odds of becoming a successful self-published author with no credentials resembles the odds of being hit by lightning, then you have a long term problem in the industry,
My fear is that we'll see the industry become one where new authors can only make it (with the occasional lightning strike so that people can pretend it's still possible to get 'discovered') if they're already famous for something else, or have friends who will review it on a high profile review site, or license a well-known name.
Otherwise there's simply no way for you to distinguish yourself from the 10,000 other titles this month all of whom have authors just as eager as you are to use whatever tools you use to get someone - anyone to read their book.
> 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!
The trouble for RIM is that it's really competing in a different market segment - low bandwidth, secure e-mail channel phones, which really *aren't* generalized smart phones. They're designed for that market, they own that market, and, unfortunately for RIM, that market is dying.
IBM had to completely re-invent itself not because the it ever lost its market (mainframes) - it's market became financially irrelevant. Microsoft is petrified that while it will own the PC forever, the PC itself will become irrelevant.
As for poor RIM, they are facing a situation of dropping bandwidth costs, better batteries, increasing processor bang per milliWatt, and the fact it looks like consumers will dictate what hardware businesses will use (after all, VPs are consumers too). In other words, their market is getting eaten by a completely different market.
This is the hardest situation for any company to be in - everything you do well is no longer relevant.
Most companies don't get one big idea, and RIM got that. Microsoft got two (Windows and Office), maybe three with XBox. Apple? Well, Apple's somehow been blessed with five. (Apple II, Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad).
Will RIM survive? It has some time, as its third world market will be relevant for quite a while yet. But if it wants to be anything more than a second string Android maker, it will require a second big idea, and not many companies manage that.
I don't understand this logic.if the hardware was standardized, anyone could make the chip and someone would find a way to compete (speed improvements, power consumption,...)
My comment about the desktop was unrelated to ARM. I was trying to point out that if you become a significant player in a market where cost rather than flexibility is the main factor (i.e. the mainstream desktop), you are likely to *lose* a lot of your current choice.
Your point about Windows 8 is a very good one. We may lose a lot of choice because of it. On the other hand, much reduced costs to enter a now much larger market may well boost participation significantly.
I'm not so certain. If the business community settles in on a standard, instead of the Linux community being composed of a dozen different distributions, all of which have roughly equal mindshare among contributors, you end up with only one to which you contribute if you want to be at all relevant, which means the alternatives wither from lack of customer and eventually programmer interest.
My thesis (speculation to be sure, but built on observation), is that you *cannot* sustain that level of choice in a market that is in any way mature.
I'm pretty certain he'd prefer a consortium that produces a common set of standards, but he raises an important point.
Choice costs.
It's wonderful that you have the a massively wide variety of choices, unconstrained by the a central authority, but don't forget that the cost of having that choice is going to be significant. There's a reason that almost all lines of business tend towards either a few big winners or, if the product is essentially identical, commoditization.
It's why I often wonder at why Linux users dream about taking over the desktop. If that did occur, it would mean a drive to lower cost that would result, almost inevitably, in the wholesale adoption of s single choice, reducing all the other choices to total irrelevance.
mention a single issue plaguing Java that C++ implements just fine: multiple inheritance
I had a good chuckle at that statement because in my experience, the *lack* of MI and operator overloading features is one of Java's biggest selling features. (I've worked at companies that had to make it a firing offense to use either in order to stop programmers from using these features.)
Both these features allow programmers to write elegant, stream-lined code... for themselves. Unfortunately, the guy maintaining the code who has neither the experience with the project nor the mental acuity of the original programmer to see the mental model that underlied the programmer's conception of the code then destroys everything.
In their defense, MI and operator overloading have probably protected many a programmer's job. "We can't lay off Jeff, he's the only one who will ever understand the code he wrote."
(Caveat: Of course it's *possible* to write maintainable code using these features, but it's like setting the speed limit to 120 mph - a lot more people *think* they can manage it than can actually manage it, and there's a lot of collateral damage along the way.)
I'd don't think there are too many people who are criticizing his business.
However, the original post asked why he felt shameful, so your not going to find people answering that question saying "you fely it's shameful because your providing a valuable service":-)
However, I suspect that some readers might have had some difficulty distinguishing between answering the question and the personal opinion of the answerer...
Well, there are good reasons that economists don't make good politicians. Failure to understand that what works in economic models doesn't work with people being the primary one...
Ah, but since he's charging market rates for them, they may certainly be worth buying, but they're not "treasures" in the sense of that little flush of pleasure at finding something for much less than it's worth.
But yes, an economist would indeed rightly state that he is performing a service by getting these books into the hands of those who value them most. However, a person who raises prices for truly needed goods during a crisis also ensures that the goods go to the people who have the most critical need (as measured by willingness to pay), yet are still widely despised. One of the many cases where economics and human nature diverge.
> then why does it feel so shameful to do this work?
Part of the joy of used book sales is discovering treasures. By automating this task, it allows the fellow to empty stores of these treasures. He is depriving hundreds of people of a little joy that would make their day ("Wow, I found a $5 book for $.50!") in order to actually make a living (which probably becomes a lot less pleasurable and a lot more work-a-day after a short while).
So, he feels shame because subconsciously he knows he's depriving the world of many moments of happiness!
[Note for the picky, yes, "treasures" don't 100% correlate with price differences, but you get the idea:-)]
It should be pointed out that at least for the HS high school market, the math content of the textbook is only one aspect upon which sales are based.
Most importantly, in most states and provinces, there is an approval process for textbooks that measures dozens if not hundreds of parameters including binding quality, use of names in examples (should reflect diverse population), male/female ratios in illustrations, avoidance of culturally specific contexts in problems, etc.
It can easily cost tens, if not over a hundred thousand to get approval in big states like Texas. They must also conform to the local curriculum, often must include teacher's editions, study guides, etc.
This means that it is almost unknown for identical textbooks to be usable for two large states (although one can produce different editions for different markets). However, all of this requires serious money, which is awfully hard for open-source textbook to achieve.
I find this to be a common failing of open source projects when they reach the real world. These projects provide what should be the meat of the requirements, but misse the 'dances through hoops' part. While theoretically the customer could do just the hoop-jumping for a vastly cheaper price, the reality is often that the customer prefers to pay full price for the complete package, rather than getting 80% of the package for free...
I remember being somewhere in the mid-west in the 80's in a really crowded room when I heard someone someone ask for a coffee. In a different part of the room, another voice suddenly said "CoFFee!" in the unmistakable tone of the machine. Then another voice from somewhere else echoes "coffEE?". Within a second, a third voice replies "COFFee" in yet another tone.
I added my own, and then the four of us started to track each other down through the crowd with cries of
"CoFFeE?"
"COFFEE!"
Needless to say, the rest of the room thought we were insane or members of some bizarre cult.
I turned out there were three Ontarians and someone who had visited the Science Centre recently.
A lot of fun.
Here in Toronto, I still hear people of a certain age suddenly repeat "CofffEE!" for no apparent reason.
Slashdot Mirror
But the publishers are as bad as Hollywood when it comes to sequels.
I can tell you that in all but the Left Behind series (I don't know about that), it's the author, not the publisher, that determined the length of the series.
Fiction publishing is still somewhat old fashioned - writers are still telling *their* stories.
Now having said that, publishers are saying "no" to the writer's choices a lot more often. But they're rarely telling the authors what to write.
And to be honest, if the series really is best-selling, maybe the author should actually be trusted to produce what the readers want? :-)
Not just a lion's share...they get the copyright.
Um, not in the vast majority of fiction (work-for-hire is a different kettle of fish, but not all that common except for works in somebody else's world.). Open up any fiction book to the front piece and notice who the copyright is assigned to.
'm pretty sure hiring an editor for $10k and then self publishing is a far better deal
What?
Unless you are an already established author, the odds are very high that you will make less than 100 sales total via e-pub. Many authors have trouble making 20 sales. (If you already are known and have an audience, then it's a very different deal.)
That's why publishers are important. If you manage to get accepted, not only are you having somebody else put in the $10K (or $20K once you factor editors, typesetters, copy-editors, cover designers, cover artists, warehousing, accounting, etc., etc.) but most importantly of all, you have had a dispassionate third party publicly indicate that they are confident enough that this books will sell that they are willing to invest $20K and think they can get their money back.
That reason, and that reason alone is why bookstores will stock a traditionally published book and won't stock a self-published book, even if the writer were willing to front the $20K themselves.
Note, at $20K, most publishers will lose money on an book by an unknown author, but nobody has found a better method of finding best sellers.
but hardly onto shelves
Unless you are talking small press, you're wrong. Getting your books onto bookstore shelves is the *one* service that publishers can provide that you cannot get any other way. As long as bookstores are relevant, publishers will be relevant, because there has to be *some* mechanism that takes the 100,000 titles that are published a month (self-published and traditionally published) and turns it into the 1,000 or so titles that a bookstore can usefully stock.
Very few fiction books from traditional publishers don't make at least a few thousand sales, while the vast majority of self-published books from otherwise unknown authors make two digit sales. That's why most writers are still vying to be traditionally published.
[Note, self-publishing for a known author whose fans are looking for new work is an entirely different ball-game.]
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.)
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.)
Agreed, however, there is are some saving graces for modern authors.
Novelty: The simple fact that something was produced years ago will turn off quite a number of readers, even if the actual words are indistinguishable from what would be written today. Go figure.
Changing industry: What was produced even ten years ago is often quite different from what is in current favor today. Books, like clothing, have fashion, and even if there were, for example, a sweep back to epic fantasy from the vampire/werewolf fantasy of today, I strongly suspect the epic fantasy output of the 1980's would feed dated to the reader of the 2020's.
Filters: The trouble with free often comes unfiltered. If your time is worth $10 and hour, wasting ten hours to find the book that you like is way more expensive than buying it.
So, you are absolutely right, the anchor price could go to free, and then, when people don't actually like the stuff they can get for free, they may well end up giving up reading altogether, rather than pay for something they would enjoy. Certainly that's my nightmare scenario.
> 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.
> Your analysis seems to assume no other promotional efforts other than casting the ebook upon the waters and waiting.
No, for a self-published author with no name recognition, I assume a huge amount of promotion in order to get into the two and low three digit range. Unfortunately, the iron rule holds, there's only a miniscule chance that a self-published author that you have no information upon (like reviews elsewhere) is going to be readable. Readers know this, and for those who value their time, the net value of such a book is *negative*. Readers also know that the amount of promotion, be it blogs or tweets is unrelated to the quality of a book. So, almost everyone I know runs screaming from promotion for self-published books. It's not that they're evil or universally awful, it's simply that the statistics are against it, and there just isn't enough time to even glance at all the self-published titles in a genre in a given month.
So, no, I assume that self-published authors work their backside off trying to promote their books (as can be seen by the fact that walking the SF con dealers rooms can become quite a gauntlet). I just assume (from my experience) that it mostly doesn't work. (As I said, just enough lightning strikes to allow one to believe, but not the thousands of authors a year "making it" necessary to keep the industry healthy.)
Now, if an author is already famous (for some value of famous), then sure, they might pick the book up. In the SF realm, John Scalzi is an example of someone who parlayed 10 years of effort in cultivating a truly interesting and funny web site into a *chance* at success. People were willing to *try* the books because of what they knew of him, but it was the books themselves that allowed him to become successful. Likewise, being friends with reviewers at a big name review site will help - won't get you a good review, but will give you a *chance* at a review. And that's several orders of magnitude better. But again, without personal connections or fame outside the industry, you need really, really, really good luck.
(The only way out of this vicious cycle I can see is if you could pay a site to review your books and they did a good enough review that it was taken seriously by readers. But how long would that last as a business when you rated 95% of the books that paid a few hundred dollars for a review an 'F'?)
> So if readers are spending half as much money on their books, the authors are making twice as much money after cutting out the middlemen at the publisher.
Unless of course, without the middleman, the reader can't determine between which of 10,000 un-gatekeepered books to buy, 98% which aren't terribly good, and thus decides to go play on his Xbox :-)
At least in a real bookstore, if you bought in your favorite genre at random, you probably had a 10%-50% chance of finding something decent (depending on how picky you were), so it was worth your time to try new authors.
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 :-)
> if you self-published the big publishing houses will not touch you.
I have to say that that is no longer true. Big houses are now looking at self-published successes (the very, very few) and offering contracts. Hard to believe, but true.
However, if you've managed to make it as a self-published author, the mathematics is such that you may well make more money as a self-published author.
It should be emphasized, though, that if you haven't already got a fan base, the odds of making a big success (able to earn $30K+/year) as a self published writer are probably 1,000 times smaller than if you get yourself conventionally published. (By eyeballing, I'd say there's an 1 in 20 chance of a conventionally published author being able to make a middle-class career out of writing, and perhaps 1 in 20,000 of an equally talented author but unknown making a career of it - just look at the number of new authors who disappear after 1-3 books - most of them.)
Also, I'd say that there's really only *one* reason that publishers still hold value - they can get you into a real bookstore. The advance is nice, but a presence in a real bookstore is the difference between 1 in 20 and 1 in 20,000.
> Cream rises to the top in any market.
Sorry, you're dreaming.
In the old system, you might have a hundred books a month in your genre make it on to the store shelves, which pretty much guaranteed a few thousand sales. If the book caught the reader's imagination (I won't say "if it's good enough", because "good" (by any metric) and "sells well" are pretty much orthogonal - not opposite, just not related), then word of mouth spread and you could gradually build your audience, if the publisher kept publishing you.
In the e-world, if you are unknown, you are competing against 10,000 books a month (no gate-keepers now!). Unfortunately, probably perhaps 200 or 300 of those books are "publishable" by the old standards, which means that most readers won't touch a book from an author they've never heard of, not for 0.99, and in fact not for free. After all, time is precious, and if there's was a, say, 30% of liking an unknown book, with e-books, it's now probably a 0.6% chance.
Most e-books from an unknown author probably make double digit sales, if that. And that, unfortunately, is not likely to start the ball rolling, even if it has "what it takes" to make it big.
Now of course, you *can* have lightning strike. But when the odds of becoming a successful self-published author with no credentials resembles the odds of being hit by lightning, then you have a long term problem in the industry,
My fear is that we'll see the industry become one where new authors can only make it (with the occasional lightning strike so that people can pretend it's still possible to get 'discovered') if they're already famous for something else, or have friends who will review it on a high profile review site, or license a well-known name.
Otherwise there's simply no way for you to distinguish yourself from the 10,000 other titles this month all of whom have authors just as eager as you are to use whatever tools you use to get someone - anyone to read their book.
> 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!
The trouble for RIM is that it's really competing in a different market segment - low bandwidth, secure e-mail channel phones, which really *aren't* generalized smart phones. They're designed for that market, they own that market, and, unfortunately for RIM, that market is dying.
IBM had to completely re-invent itself not because the it ever lost its market (mainframes) - it's market became financially irrelevant. Microsoft is petrified that while it will own the PC forever, the PC itself will become irrelevant.
As for poor RIM, they are facing a situation of dropping bandwidth costs, better batteries, increasing processor bang per milliWatt, and the fact it looks like consumers will dictate what hardware businesses will use (after all, VPs are consumers too). In other words, their market is getting eaten by a completely different market.
This is the hardest situation for any company to be in - everything you do well is no longer relevant.
Most companies don't get one big idea, and RIM got that. Microsoft got two (Windows and Office), maybe three with XBox. Apple? Well, Apple's somehow been blessed with five. (Apple II, Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad).
Will RIM survive? It has some time, as its third world market will be relevant for quite a while yet. But if it wants to be anything more than a second string Android maker, it will require a second big idea, and not many companies manage that.
I don't understand this logic.if the hardware was standardized, anyone could make the chip and someone would find a way to compete (speed improvements, power consumption, ...)
My comment about the desktop was unrelated to ARM. I was trying to point out that if you become a significant player in a market where cost rather than flexibility is the main factor (i.e. the mainstream desktop), you are likely to *lose* a lot of your current choice.
Your point about Windows 8 is a very good one. We may lose a lot of choice because of it. On the other hand, much reduced costs to enter a now much larger market may well boost participation significantly.
I'm not so certain. If the business community settles in on a standard, instead of the Linux community being composed of a dozen different distributions, all of which have roughly equal mindshare among contributors, you end up with only one to which you contribute if you want to be at all relevant, which means the alternatives wither from lack of customer and eventually programmer interest.
My thesis (speculation to be sure, but built on observation), is that you *cannot* sustain that level of choice in a market that is in any way mature.
I'm pretty certain he'd prefer a consortium that produces a common set of standards, but he raises an important point.
Choice costs.
It's wonderful that you have the a massively wide variety of choices, unconstrained by the a central authority, but don't forget that the cost of having that choice is going to be significant. There's a reason that almost all lines of business tend towards either a few big winners or, if the product is essentially identical, commoditization.
It's why I often wonder at why Linux users dream about taking over the desktop. If that did occur, it would mean a drive to lower cost that would result, almost inevitably, in the wholesale adoption of s single choice, reducing all the other choices to total irrelevance.
mention a single issue plaguing Java that C++ implements just fine: multiple inheritance
I had a good chuckle at that statement because in my experience, the *lack* of MI and operator overloading features is one of Java's biggest selling features. (I've worked at companies that had to make it a firing offense to use either in order to stop programmers from using these features.)
Both these features allow programmers to write elegant, stream-lined code... for themselves. Unfortunately, the guy maintaining the code who has neither the experience with the project nor the mental acuity of the original programmer to see the mental model that underlied the programmer's conception of the code then destroys everything.
In their defense, MI and operator overloading have probably protected many a programmer's job. "We can't lay off Jeff, he's the only one who will ever understand the code he wrote."
(Caveat: Of course it's *possible* to write maintainable code using these features, but it's like setting the speed limit to 120 mph - a lot more people *think* they can manage it than can actually manage it, and there's a lot of collateral damage along the way.)
I'd don't think there are too many people who are criticizing his business.
However, the original post asked why he felt shameful, so your not going to find people answering that question saying "you fely it's shameful because your providing a valuable service" :-)
However, I suspect that some readers might have had some difficulty distinguishing between answering the question and the personal opinion of the answerer...
Well, there are good reasons that economists don't make good politicians. Failure to understand that what works in economic models doesn't work with people being the primary one...
Ah, but since he's charging market rates for them, they may certainly be worth buying, but they're not "treasures" in the sense of that little flush of pleasure at finding something for much less than it's worth.
But yes, an economist would indeed rightly state that he is performing a service by getting these books into the hands of those who value them most. However, a person who raises prices for truly needed goods during a crisis also ensures that the goods go to the people who have the most critical need (as measured by willingness to pay), yet are still widely despised. One of the many cases where economics and human nature diverge.
> then why does it feel so shameful to do this work?
Part of the joy of used book sales is discovering treasures. By automating this task, it allows the fellow to empty stores of these treasures. He is depriving hundreds of people of a little joy that would make their day ("Wow, I found a $5 book for $.50!") in order to actually make a living (which probably becomes a lot less pleasurable and a lot more work-a-day after a short while).
So, he feels shame because subconsciously he knows he's depriving the world of many moments of happiness!
[Note for the picky, yes, "treasures" don't 100% correlate with price differences, but you get the idea :-)]
It should be pointed out that at least for the HS high school market, the math content of the textbook is only one aspect upon which sales are based.
Most importantly, in most states and provinces, there is an approval process for textbooks that measures dozens if not hundreds of parameters including binding quality, use of names in examples (should reflect diverse population), male/female ratios in illustrations, avoidance of culturally specific contexts in problems, etc.
It can easily cost tens, if not over a hundred thousand to get approval in big states like Texas. They must also conform to the local curriculum, often must include teacher's editions, study guides, etc.
This means that it is almost unknown for identical textbooks to be usable for two large states (although one can produce different editions for different markets). However, all of this requires serious money, which is awfully hard for open-source textbook to achieve.
I find this to be a common failing of open source projects when they reach the real world. These projects provide what should be the meat of the requirements, but misse the 'dances through hoops' part. While theoretically the customer could do just the hoop-jumping for a vastly cheaper price, the reality is often that the customer prefers to pay full price for the complete package, rather than getting 80% of the package for free...
I remember being somewhere in the mid-west in the 80's in a really crowded room when I heard someone someone ask for a coffee. In a different part of the room, another voice suddenly said "CoFFee!" in the unmistakable tone of the machine. Then another voice from somewhere else echoes "coffEE?". Within a second, a third voice replies "COFFee" in yet another tone.
I added my own, and then the four of us started to track each other down through the crowd with cries of
"CoFFeE?"
"COFFEE!"
Needless to say, the rest of the room thought we were insane or members of some bizarre cult.
I turned out there were three Ontarians and someone who had visited the Science Centre recently.
A lot of fun.
Here in Toronto, I still hear people of a certain age suddenly repeat "CofffEE!" for no apparent reason.
Freaks out the youngsters.