They aren't talking about free, they're talking about theft. -yawn- Yet another content creator upset that they can't make money on piracy.
"If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it, I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list."
Yeah, that's a BIG hint that piracy and sales aren't linked in any useful way. Stop wishing you could turn any portion of that into real sales. Download numbers aren't related to sales numbers at all.
Just face reality: Your book isn't actually popular at all.
Yeah. It's sad that this author cant sell more books, but the people who download books are not the same people who buy books- it's the same as with people who download movies. It's hoarding plain and simple.
I would seriously suggest that the author have a look at Cory Doctorow's work. Right on his home page, you can download his books in any free, non drm format you like. Yet he seems to do quite well selling his books too.
Heck, if your book is out of print and still getting 800+ downloads a week, I'd contact the download site and tell them you'd bless the download if they put a donate link in the book or on the download page. What have you got to lose?
Or, you could always sue your customers, that's worked well for the RIAA.
> I would seriously suggest that the author have a look at Cory Doctorow's work. Right on his home page, you can download his books in any free, non drm format you like. Yet he seems to do quite well selling his books too.
Yes, but he is also a popular figure known before the times of mass ebook piracy, and connected to one of the most popular blogs on the internet. How does this work for the average writer?
I remember Stephen King doing an experiment with free online content that ended horribly.
That's a pretty good suggestion. The 800 downloads won't go away. If she offers the book for download at her personal site, she can have a forum there for fans to talk and give feedback. That would give a better idea of the real interest in the book and she'd have control over it and better good will from readers.
"Download numbers aren't related to sales numbers at all."
You have two groups of people, one buying, one pirating, and they share the common goal of obtaining x.
To claim pirated copies are completely unrelated when there's quite obviously that relationship is just as extreme and silly as claiming they're all lost sales.
"To claim pirated copies are completely unrelated when there's quite obviously that relationship is just as extreme and silly as claiming they're all lost sales."
To be sure, there is a relationship, but it’s not at all obvious what the sign of the relationship is.
John Scalzi noted that physical sales of his books shot up after he released free ebook versions (33%, 20%, and 9% for The Ghost Brigades, Old Man's War, and The Android's Dream, respectively).
I'm not arguing that pirating ebooks isn't wrong -- I think the author should have the choice of whether or not her own works are available for free. Just sayin', your "You have two groups of people, one buying, one pirating, and they share the common goal of obtaining x." model oversimplifies things.
The common goal is not just obtaining x - people buy a book to have a physical book and the sensory experience reading it. People who download (pirated versions of) books may or may not do the same with the book.
Given that people who pirate books often download more than they would ever buy (or consume, for that matter), I think the equivalent would be more people sitting in a bookshop and casually browsing the book. Saying that you can convert HALF of the people who browse through your book in a bookstore to buyers is, if anything, proof that you lost contact with reality.
The one thing that I do completely agree with in the article: "If you REALLY can’t afford books, ask your library to order them."
Libraries are a great way for people to share books, and usually the cost of actually running the library (i.e. staffing and room) dwarfs acquisition costs for the books. Hence, recommending a book to your library that other people could like is generally a good thing. (And you have a nice, physical book, and the authors get some money. What's not to like).
I agree, this is the reason DRM should be relaxed to allow 20-30% of the book be readable without license. As it stands it's 100% readable when the DRM is stripped off.
This is only really worthwhile if I get to pick-and-choose the 20-30% myself (which implies I could get the full 100% if I wanted to make the effort). A table of contents, chapters 1 and maybe 2, possibly 3, and perhaps an epilogue and index may constitute 20% of a book but wouldn't be very useful in many situations. As a concrete example, many programming books devote their first 100 pages or so to introductory material, even if around page 500 they start going into 3D vector spaces or such. I'm interested in that later material, not the introductory stuff, and I'd feel cheated if a Google-indexed Index page led me to believe I could get some free info when I couldn't.
Edit: I would concede that fiction titles can benefit from releasing chapters 1, 2, 3 as a further hook into getting people to buy it. But people and publishers do this already, have for a long time, it works pretty well for them.
It's worked fairly well for music, but in the case of reference material I agree it's a poor substitute to skimming the actual book. Maybe something like a Zune Pass for books would be better. Flat fee, read as much as you want, keep rights to download some for keeps.
She's popular to the tune of 800 free downloads per week and 10 sales per week.
Anecdotally, one of the ISVs over on Programmers.stackexchange had a piracy problem; when he started detecting pirated software and reminding the user to buy, not steal, his sales numbers directly went up.
I think this idea that downloading IP for free is ok is really wrong. If you want something, you should pay the price for it, whether the price be fixed or negotiated. IP piracy is theft.
And a single copy can only service a small number too, not an infinite number, as only one person can be in possession of it at one time and usually borrow it for weeks at a time.
No, you should check out the book so they know people are interested in it and perhaps then will order more copies. Maybe it would then be ok to download it and use it for the period you have it checked out, but even that is debatable because then you might be supporting the continuation of the illegal distribution, causing more people to download it illegally.
She didn't even say what stats site the "800" number came from. Could also be a completely bullshit number.
Personally contacting potential buyers might incite them to buy your book, no matter if they were pirates before or not. It doesn't necessarily scale to do that. Though some authors actually do promote their books (go on tours and read from the books, for example).
I don't want to defend downloading, but it is a fact of modern life, so complaining about it is unlikely to help.
Of course it's wrong, legally and usually morally too, but complaining about it won't fix anything.
If 800 people a week were downloading something of mine, after I was done dancing in the streets with joy, I'd try to figure out how to convert those downloads to fans, then sales.
>>"If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it, I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list."
>
>Yeah, that's a BIG hint that piracy and sales aren't linked in any useful way.
There was an article on HN a while ago about how 1% isn't the lowest possible number, as in "if just one percent of people who see our ad buy our product..." I'm sad that this is happening to authors, but it does sound a little like whining at this point.
She wouldn't have hit the NYT Bestseller list if that happened since she forgot to also add half of those people who didn't buy the books in the NYT Bestseller list.
What did you imagine? That you could just by magic reach potentially 6Billion people without any cost of distribution and be the only one allowed to take advantage of it?
Here is the thing. If you want to make it hard for people to copy your books, don't distribute them digitally.
Or charge 1 USD pr. book.
Or learn to do the design, marketing and printing yourself
Add something to your book that makes it worth buying.
There are so many ways to approach this and you have no option but to embrace it and accept it and learn to sell in that environment cause thousands and thousands today can write books.
It's weird. What I get from this post is "if you won't buy my book, please read something else". That, of course sounds logical but she is missing that she is telling freeloaders to download some other author's works, thus "marketing" the other author and not her. I would not do it like that.
Agreed. She also invokes the fact that she cannot publish everywhere. There are some self-publishing services out there that can do the trick. Seems like an awful lot of whining to me.
If she's already gone with a publisher (which she has), it's no longer up to her - she (likely, but it depends on her contract) can't submit that work to a separate publisher even if she wanted.
I'm also not sure I buy the people saying that she should go at it alone next time, and solely self-publish. Doing so means that, among other things, she'd have no advance to live on while writing it, no editors to work with her on making the copy better, no typesetters to make the text flow well on whatever platforms it gets distributed on, no artists for cover design, no translation support to release international editions, and - this is the important one - no advertising and distribution support to get the book places into bricks-and-mortar stores (as most stores look down hard on self-published books).
It's not just a matter of saying "OK, I'll self-publish"; there are all sorts of other costs that are a part of publishing a book that a publisher normally covers, which you have to pay for yourself should you self-publish.
If she really believes she can get 800 downloads a week with no promotion, most of your objections there kind of disappear. (The typesetters, editors and translators are the only ones that continue to matter, and those can be hired for fairly cheap — take a look at http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ for a real ebook author's take on the matter.)
I am an author and have a book distributed over Kindle. People who bought my book wanted to buy it, and people who pirated it wanted to get it for free. That's okay with me. The two are not linked.
I would never get angry if someone loaned one of my books to another person, so why would I get angry about someone pirating it. And if people had not loaned me many books, I would never have grown to love writing. It's just the case that the internet can loan many books to people easily (or so I see it).
The market is very fickle about what it likes. Effort spent fighting piracy should be spent on writing more books and promoting them. In the meantime, I would endorse piracy of a commercially failed book as a way of spreading my name.
It's obvious this person's book didn't fail in touching people, it just failed in inspiring them to buy. The solution to any writer's problem is to write more.
This is exactly what I do, which is why it frustrates me so much when some authors/publishers/wives of dead authors (like with the Wheel of Time series) won't allow the release of the ebook until well after the hardcover. Instead I resort to piracy because the whole reason I got a kindle was to avoid buying physical novels and particularly hardcovers, since I travel/move countries so much.
Publishers and authors and whatnot who do this are just insane. You should tap into the fact that many fans of popular fantasy/science fiction are also gadget freaks, and allow them to buy your books when they come out instead of losing sales due to piracy.
> They aren't talking about free, they're talking about theft. -yawn- Yet another content creator upset that they can't make money on piracy.
Yes, how selfish of him, the CREATOR.
> Yeah, that's a BIG hint that piracy and sales aren't linked in any useful way. Stop wishing you could turn any portion of that into real sales. Download numbers aren't related to sales numbers at all.
No, but they are related to people BREAKING THE LAW and reading YOUR WORK for free.
Even if they weren't about to buy it no matter what, they should pay for READING IT anyway.
Oh, and If you ain't gonna read it, don't download it. What are you, a hoarder?
The article suggests that some readers had problems obtaining a copy of the book.
If you can get a copy of the book legally, you should, but it seems like some customers weren't able to, and had to choose between obtaining it illegally, or waiting indefinitely on the whim of the publisher. I find it difficult to fault them for the former.
While I agree, the publisher should be providing books in every region they can, it's not as simple matter of the publisher saying "I hate China, let's make them wait for the new book cause I'm a jerk." It's a matter of if they print an edition there do they believe they can recoup the losses of printing it. Publishers are out to make money.
Saying that there is nothing wrong with illegally downloading a book or whatever just because it isn't legally available in your area is rubbish. It's like saying having your friend in the US steal an Xbox from a store and ship it to you is ok because you can't legally buy one where you are. It's obviously not as simple as that, but it's just lame to rationalize breaking the law because you want to.
The stolen Xbox is gone, nobody can buy it.
The Ebook can be downloaded no matter how many times someone does so without paying.
I'm not sure about books, but at least for US movies/tv-series it can take quite an amount of time to be legally available in Europe. Even if they are available via Hulu inside the US!
I understand the reason (earning money by selling licenses to foreign TV channels), but it surely encourages "stealing" the content by using nonofficial media-portals.
Even if it "encourages" it hardly justifies it. It is breaking the law, plain and simple. I'm rather tired of people shifting the blame to the content producers or publishers. If you're going to break the law, at least own up to it and don't try to shift the blame.
I didn't want to talk about law, it's surely illegal.
We could talk abbout ethics, I don't believe the current rules for IP are fair.
But let's simply talk about business opportunities - as others have pointed out, you can make money with free downloads and a donation button. Or bundling some advertisment with your product. Static content (e.g. music, books, most games,...) can and will be pirated, whining won't stopp anyone.
Because that’s what it boils down to is convenience. People who illegally download books are more interested in their convenience than in supporting the authors they want to read. It’s not hard to go to the library, it just takes time..
Since you're treating your writing as a business (which is fine) why not actually give your customers what they want? If your customers want to be able to buy your e-book in their location, why can't they? Blame your publisher (I do, but I'm also OK with people pirating that book).
J A Konrath is an author who's highly realistic about this. His post about piracy nails it: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/piracy-again.html - He's selling his books for merely a few dollars each and on a DRM-ed platform (the Kindle) and is still making more.
One of the comments on the post struck me, too:
I have a professional musician on my friends list and he makes posts like this all the time. He said the amount of time he spends cracking down on his albums being distributed illegally (he's a fairly popular, but completely independent artist) is ridiculous. And that he'll be at a show and someone will come up and just cheerily tell him that, "Hey, I illegally downloaded your songs, man. LOVE THEM!" It's insane how entitled people are.
Someone AT his show? You mean, someone pirated his almost zero marginal cost material and then paid up good money to attend his show and that's a bad thing? Thankfully, many sane independent musicians have realized this is a great way to go and are profiting from it.
That's a very good point. The download was a very effective marketing tool whether the musician wanted it to be or not.
Really, the hardest thing in these creative industries is marketing, promoting your personal or band brand identity and developing a following.
Smart communities wait to see where paths form and then put in walkways.
Smart marketing is seeing what actually works to promote your product and then encouraging more of it. Clearly for the described musician downloads were building a fan base from which he was able to then make a living.
it is wrong to estimate that all those who downloaded the book illegally would go and buy paperback if there was no way to download it for free. i bet a good share of those who downloaded free copy downloaded it to maybe read sometime in the future but never read it. only 20%-30% of those who downloaded a free copy are potential buyers of paperback book. the author should take a look at freemium models and come up with a creative way of making money from the books while adapting world WILD web
This story makes me so sad, not because people are stealing her work, but because the author doesn't look at those 800 people a week as potential fans who would fund her next book.
Forget about selling the book itself, use the book as a way to find new fans. If half those 800 people each week signed up for her email list or followed her on Twitter, she would have a huge fan base which should could tap to FUND HER NEXT BOOK on Kickstarter.
Sell the making of the content, not the consumption of the content.
The hardcore fans will want her to write the next book, so they will fund it. Some percentage of the random people who download her book will turn into hardcore fans. It's a scalable, repeatable cycle.
400 people a week = 20k in a year. 5% of that giving $15 is $15,000, her entire advance.
EDIT: I did basically this model for documentaries and built an audience of a million members.
Out of curiosity, do you know of anyone who has actually done this? I'm not entirely convinced this model is as repeatable as you think. I'd be interested to see more data on the subject.
Music works the same way. You use CDs to build up a fan base. It's a physical artifact they can keep and develop loyalty towards. When the fan base is big enough, you can make a living. Maybe. After 20 years of hard work. Being an artist that works in creative original artwork, be it sculpture, music or books is NOT an easy path. Easy path is a corporate job with benefits. Very easy path is government job with benefits you can't get fired from and where you don't actually have to work. Both these are bureaucracy and administration. If you want to be artsy, you won't have stable or high income unless you are lucky, a very hard worker, smart at marketing, brilliant at art, and work at it every day for at least 10-30 years.
Check out J A Konrath's blog, http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ , he does various experiments and publishes their results occasionally. He self-publishes e-novels. And offers space to other self-publishers on his blog who write about their experiences.
Musicians, authors, filmmakers, artists, whatever. Lots of creative people are able to leverage a dedicated fan base into a livable, if not insanely lucrative, salary.
The key is to provide something scarce. Since books, music, etc. are digital, they no longer are scare, but you can offer things like a day in the studio with the band, or for an author it could be advanced drafts, a $1000 dollar option to get your name as a character in a new book, signed special editions, you name it.
It may not get you to the top of the NYT Bestseller List, but if done with an eye toward your core fans, you can absolutely make a living on your art.
So the model is to be that people good at making art should not make money for making art. They should make money from ancillary things? That doesn't seem like a very good way to things.
If programmers were paid that we we would get no pay for writing good working code. To get paid we'd have to man the support lines and would be paid based on the feedback we get from the people calling for help. Anyone here willing to ask their employer to switch to that model?
That's more or less the way IBM, HP, EDS, Infosys, Wipro, SAP, Keane, Red Hat, and Pivotal work. As I understand it, they all get paid some for selling software, but they get paid a lot more for performing professional services — a lot of which are pretty closely analogous to manning the support lines.
The old statistic was that about 95% of programmers were working on company-internal projects, which means they don't get paid royalties for their code, because there are none. Instead they get paid, at least in theory, for satisfying their company-internal clients — whether that involves writing good working code, writing nonworking code, or answering support calls.
It doesn't necessarily mean that your job becomes marketing instead of art, but even just a bit of connecting with your fans can make a huge difference.
And this is more focused on creative fields, because they have been so widely 'disrupted' by technology. I can download a book from a torrent site, but I can't download a programmer's time at working on a problem (though I could of course download OSS code, but that's a whole other thing).
So books used to make a lot of money (for very few people), now they don't make as much money, but the positive thing is that more people can get in on the action, because the costs of distribution are so much lower. And in this author's case, she's basically ranting about how fans of her books aren't paying her, when she could spend that energy much more effectively by somehow connecting with and cultivating that fanbase. If they like her stuff, they'll probably pay her for something, if not a physical book.
Exactly. She's trapped by her own old way of thinking about selling books.
I'm not saying it would be easy for her to grok the new mindset. Or that a new better perfect business model exists. I think we're still in a transition period where we are learning what the new model is.
> EDIT: I did basically this model for documentaries and built an audience of a million members.
Have you published a balance sheet of one of these documentaries, with numbers like how many people followed you on Twitter, how many signed up for your email list, how many donated money, and so on? A good writeup of how to use this model might help a lot with getting people to consider it as a realistic option, at least if it gets some attention.
We started in 2003 and just kind of stumbled onto this model because we had no other options. It wasn't planned out like I just described, although I 100% believe it is the business model of the future for independent artists. I had to hack together all the tech for it, so my new startup (nationbuilder.com) is about packaging it all up so others can do this model too.
To be honest, this is almost bordering on the ridiculous. Why should people go to extreme lengths to find a hardcopy of the book? There is this feeling of entitlement, "I am an artist, so I am not supposed to have to worry about all this commercial stuff". Meanwhile, other people have discovered that convenience actually makes people buy stuff rather than pirate it.
Possibly the 800 people per week who download the book aren't reading it? In http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-October... I did some numbers, and reading an ebook costs around 240 times as much as simply downloading it. So a purely self-interested person would download it if there's more than about a ½% chance that they'd actually read it. If most people downloading it are just over that threshold, then 800 downloads per week might represent only 5 new readers per week.
If you download a torrent containing many different ebooks, the ratio goes even higher. I have a Project Gutenberg torrent containing several thousand public-domain books. By the time I finish downloading it, it might turn out to have cost me ten minutes of my time, about a thousand times less than it would take me to navigate a web site to download a single book.
I own thousands of printed books. A few I have actually read.
I don't own an ereader and don't plan to get one. I also hate reading pdfs on the computer since the text is straining and I prefer to read for fun lying down or outside and not at a desk.
I think the author of the article is delusional. She thinks of herself as a NYT best selling author because of some number she estimated of downloads of her work, all of which she assumes are by people who want to not only read her work, but buy it as well.
First there is no evidence of the number that read it electronically. So 10 a week bought it, fine those are the fans. But the others may be hoarders, may be downloading bots, who knows.
Second, if comparing to best selling authors by multiplying sales figures by a factor of 80 to account for "piracy", one should also multiply the big name authors' sales figures by 80 as well since they should be accorded the same privilege. And then, not a best selling author anymore since the relative ranking is the same as before.
What is very normal is most authors never make back their advance. This has been happening for 100 years. An advance of $15,000 says that the publisher knew the book would not sell a lot of copies, and they were right.
It's nice to have a printed book, gives you some credibility. It's not typical to make a living selling printed copies of your work, that's something that only happens for a small number of authors.
To make more money, improve your skills, write more, and even develop a fan base by giving away free short stories, or selling them to magazines for the (very low) magazine rate. Few read magazines anymore so you can instead develop fans with free samples.
It's very unlikely that the pirated copies are changing the bottom line in any meaningful way. It's just as likely they are bringing in more fans and sales as it is that sales are being lost. It's entirely possible that without the free advertising of the piracy she only sells 5 hard copies a week instead of 10.
> I also hate reading pdfs on the computer since the text is straining and I prefer to read for fun lying down or outside and not at a desk.
Ignoring the rest of your post, the Kindle basically solves the above problems. I can read for hours with it, whereas I get fidgety reading a PDF on the computer in a few minutes, and my eyes feel tired as well.
In case it was not clear, the part of my post following the word "also" only refers to reading pdfs on a desktop/laptop/pad computer screen.
The reasons why, before the "also", I stated "I don't own an ereader and don't plan to get one." are not stated. They are:
I tried a Kindle and found the user interface difficult, the speed slow, and did not like the markup options. The battery stuff is also an issue, as is the cost. I can't read 100 books at once so there is no point to being able to carry 100 books with me.
Hard copies are so much better for me there's no comparison.
Didn't mean to get into a discussion of preferences or technology, nor is this expanded comment meant to reflect in any way on what works for other people who obviously have different values and interests.
I was starting my previous comment with the preamble to briefly give some background to my claim that I own many printed books but no ebooks. This was because I wanted to establish I have no personal motivation or interest in whether ebooks are available of her work or not. The motivation of the comment was a criticism of elements of her article, such as comparing herself to a potentially best-selling author.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] thread"If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it, I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list."
Yeah, that's a BIG hint that piracy and sales aren't linked in any useful way. Stop wishing you could turn any portion of that into real sales. Download numbers aren't related to sales numbers at all.
Just face reality: Your book isn't actually popular at all.
I would seriously suggest that the author have a look at Cory Doctorow's work. Right on his home page, you can download his books in any free, non drm format you like. Yet he seems to do quite well selling his books too.
Heck, if your book is out of print and still getting 800+ downloads a week, I'd contact the download site and tell them you'd bless the download if they put a donate link in the book or on the download page. What have you got to lose?
Or, you could always sue your customers, that's worked well for the RIAA.
Yes, but he is also a popular figure known before the times of mass ebook piracy, and connected to one of the most popular blogs on the internet. How does this work for the average writer?
I remember Stephen King doing an experiment with free online content that ended horribly.
You have two groups of people, one buying, one pirating, and they share the common goal of obtaining x.
To claim pirated copies are completely unrelated when there's quite obviously that relationship is just as extreme and silly as claiming they're all lost sales.
To be sure, there is a relationship, but it’s not at all obvious what the sign of the relationship is.
John Scalzi noted that physical sales of his books shot up after he released free ebook versions (33%, 20%, and 9% for The Ghost Brigades, Old Man's War, and The Android's Dream, respectively).
I'm not arguing that pirating ebooks isn't wrong -- I think the author should have the choice of whether or not her own works are available for free. Just sayin', your "You have two groups of people, one buying, one pirating, and they share the common goal of obtaining x." model oversimplifies things.
Given that people who pirate books often download more than they would ever buy (or consume, for that matter), I think the equivalent would be more people sitting in a bookshop and casually browsing the book. Saying that you can convert HALF of the people who browse through your book in a bookstore to buyers is, if anything, proof that you lost contact with reality.
The one thing that I do completely agree with in the article: "If you REALLY can’t afford books, ask your library to order them." Libraries are a great way for people to share books, and usually the cost of actually running the library (i.e. staffing and room) dwarfs acquisition costs for the books. Hence, recommending a book to your library that other people could like is generally a good thing. (And you have a nice, physical book, and the authors get some money. What's not to like).
Edit: I would concede that fiction titles can benefit from releasing chapters 1, 2, 3 as a further hook into getting people to buy it. But people and publishers do this already, have for a long time, it works pretty well for them.
Anecdotally, one of the ISVs over on Programmers.stackexchange had a piracy problem; when he started detecting pirated software and reminding the user to buy, not steal, his sales numbers directly went up.
I think this idea that downloading IP for free is ok is really wrong. If you want something, you should pay the price for it, whether the price be fixed or negotiated. IP piracy is theft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right
And a single copy can only service a small number too, not an infinite number, as only one person can be in possession of it at one time and usually borrow it for weeks at a time.
Personally contacting potential buyers might incite them to buy your book, no matter if they were pirates before or not. It doesn't necessarily scale to do that. Though some authors actually do promote their books (go on tours and read from the books, for example).
I don't want to defend downloading, but it is a fact of modern life, so complaining about it is unlikely to help.
If 800 people a week were downloading something of mine, after I was done dancing in the streets with joy, I'd try to figure out how to convert those downloads to fans, then sales.
There was an article on HN a while ago about how 1% isn't the lowest possible number, as in "if just one percent of people who see our ad buy our product..." I'm sad that this is happening to authors, but it does sound a little like whining at this point.
What did you imagine? That you could just by magic reach potentially 6Billion people without any cost of distribution and be the only one allowed to take advantage of it?
Here is the thing. If you want to make it hard for people to copy your books, don't distribute them digitally.
Or charge 1 USD pr. book.
Or learn to do the design, marketing and printing yourself
Add something to your book that makes it worth buying.
There are so many ways to approach this and you have no option but to embrace it and accept it and learn to sell in that environment cause thousands and thousands today can write books.
I'm also not sure I buy the people saying that she should go at it alone next time, and solely self-publish. Doing so means that, among other things, she'd have no advance to live on while writing it, no editors to work with her on making the copy better, no typesetters to make the text flow well on whatever platforms it gets distributed on, no artists for cover design, no translation support to release international editions, and - this is the important one - no advertising and distribution support to get the book places into bricks-and-mortar stores (as most stores look down hard on self-published books).
It's not just a matter of saying "OK, I'll self-publish"; there are all sorts of other costs that are a part of publishing a book that a publisher normally covers, which you have to pay for yourself should you self-publish.
I would never get angry if someone loaned one of my books to another person, so why would I get angry about someone pirating it. And if people had not loaned me many books, I would never have grown to love writing. It's just the case that the internet can loan many books to people easily (or so I see it).
The market is very fickle about what it likes. Effort spent fighting piracy should be spent on writing more books and promoting them. In the meantime, I would endorse piracy of a commercially failed book as a way of spreading my name.
It's obvious this person's book didn't fail in touching people, it just failed in inspiring them to buy. The solution to any writer's problem is to write more.
Perhaps this is a problem that someone from this community should address. Easier Than Stealing dot com sounds nice.
Publishers and authors and whatnot who do this are just insane. You should tap into the fact that many fans of popular fantasy/science fiction are also gadget freaks, and allow them to buy your books when they come out instead of losing sales due to piracy.
Yes, how selfish of him, the CREATOR.
> Yeah, that's a BIG hint that piracy and sales aren't linked in any useful way. Stop wishing you could turn any portion of that into real sales. Download numbers aren't related to sales numbers at all.
No, but they are related to people BREAKING THE LAW and reading YOUR WORK for free.
Even if they weren't about to buy it no matter what, they should pay for READING IT anyway.
Oh, and If you ain't gonna read it, don't download it. What are you, a hoarder?
If you can get a copy of the book legally, you should, but it seems like some customers weren't able to, and had to choose between obtaining it illegally, or waiting indefinitely on the whim of the publisher. I find it difficult to fault them for the former.
Saying that there is nothing wrong with illegally downloading a book or whatever just because it isn't legally available in your area is rubbish. It's like saying having your friend in the US steal an Xbox from a store and ship it to you is ok because you can't legally buy one where you are. It's obviously not as simple as that, but it's just lame to rationalize breaking the law because you want to.
Since you're treating your writing as a business (which is fine) why not actually give your customers what they want? If your customers want to be able to buy your e-book in their location, why can't they? Blame your publisher (I do, but I'm also OK with people pirating that book).
J A Konrath is an author who's highly realistic about this. His post about piracy nails it: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/piracy-again.html - He's selling his books for merely a few dollars each and on a DRM-ed platform (the Kindle) and is still making more.
One of the comments on the post struck me, too:
I have a professional musician on my friends list and he makes posts like this all the time. He said the amount of time he spends cracking down on his albums being distributed illegally (he's a fairly popular, but completely independent artist) is ridiculous. And that he'll be at a show and someone will come up and just cheerily tell him that, "Hey, I illegally downloaded your songs, man. LOVE THEM!" It's insane how entitled people are.
Someone AT his show? You mean, someone pirated his almost zero marginal cost material and then paid up good money to attend his show and that's a bad thing? Thankfully, many sane independent musicians have realized this is a great way to go and are profiting from it.
Really, the hardest thing in these creative industries is marketing, promoting your personal or band brand identity and developing a following.
Smart communities wait to see where paths form and then put in walkways.
Smart marketing is seeing what actually works to promote your product and then encouraging more of it. Clearly for the described musician downloads were building a fan base from which he was able to then make a living.
Forget about selling the book itself, use the book as a way to find new fans. If half those 800 people each week signed up for her email list or followed her on Twitter, she would have a huge fan base which should could tap to FUND HER NEXT BOOK on Kickstarter.
Sell the making of the content, not the consumption of the content.
The hardcore fans will want her to write the next book, so they will fund it. Some percentage of the random people who download her book will turn into hardcore fans. It's a scalable, repeatable cycle.
400 people a week = 20k in a year. 5% of that giving $15 is $15,000, her entire advance.
EDIT: I did basically this model for documentaries and built an audience of a million members.
Musicians, authors, filmmakers, artists, whatever. Lots of creative people are able to leverage a dedicated fan base into a livable, if not insanely lucrative, salary.
The key is to provide something scarce. Since books, music, etc. are digital, they no longer are scare, but you can offer things like a day in the studio with the band, or for an author it could be advanced drafts, a $1000 dollar option to get your name as a character in a new book, signed special editions, you name it.
It may not get you to the top of the NYT Bestseller List, but if done with an eye toward your core fans, you can absolutely make a living on your art.
There is a whole list of them at: http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/
If programmers were paid that we we would get no pay for writing good working code. To get paid we'd have to man the support lines and would be paid based on the feedback we get from the people calling for help. Anyone here willing to ask their employer to switch to that model?
The old statistic was that about 95% of programmers were working on company-internal projects, which means they don't get paid royalties for their code, because there are none. Instead they get paid, at least in theory, for satisfying their company-internal clients — whether that involves writing good working code, writing nonworking code, or answering support calls.
And this is more focused on creative fields, because they have been so widely 'disrupted' by technology. I can download a book from a torrent site, but I can't download a programmer's time at working on a problem (though I could of course download OSS code, but that's a whole other thing).
So books used to make a lot of money (for very few people), now they don't make as much money, but the positive thing is that more people can get in on the action, because the costs of distribution are so much lower. And in this author's case, she's basically ranting about how fans of her books aren't paying her, when she could spend that energy much more effectively by somehow connecting with and cultivating that fanbase. If they like her stuff, they'll probably pay her for something, if not a physical book.
I'm not saying it would be easy for her to grok the new mindset. Or that a new better perfect business model exists. I think we're still in a transition period where we are learning what the new model is.
Have you published a balance sheet of one of these documentaries, with numbers like how many people followed you on Twitter, how many signed up for your email list, how many donated money, and so on? A good writeup of how to use this model might help a lot with getting people to consider it as a realistic option, at least if it gets some attention.
There is some background in this Washington Post article from 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08...
(There is some discussion at http://www.mail-archive.com/silklist@lists.hserus.net/msg197...)
If you download a torrent containing many different ebooks, the ratio goes even higher. I have a Project Gutenberg torrent containing several thousand public-domain books. By the time I finish downloading it, it might turn out to have cost me ten minutes of my time, about a thousand times less than it would take me to navigate a web site to download a single book.
I don't own an ereader and don't plan to get one. I also hate reading pdfs on the computer since the text is straining and I prefer to read for fun lying down or outside and not at a desk.
I think the author of the article is delusional. She thinks of herself as a NYT best selling author because of some number she estimated of downloads of her work, all of which she assumes are by people who want to not only read her work, but buy it as well.
First there is no evidence of the number that read it electronically. So 10 a week bought it, fine those are the fans. But the others may be hoarders, may be downloading bots, who knows.
Second, if comparing to best selling authors by multiplying sales figures by a factor of 80 to account for "piracy", one should also multiply the big name authors' sales figures by 80 as well since they should be accorded the same privilege. And then, not a best selling author anymore since the relative ranking is the same as before.
What is very normal is most authors never make back their advance. This has been happening for 100 years. An advance of $15,000 says that the publisher knew the book would not sell a lot of copies, and they were right.
It's nice to have a printed book, gives you some credibility. It's not typical to make a living selling printed copies of your work, that's something that only happens for a small number of authors.
To make more money, improve your skills, write more, and even develop a fan base by giving away free short stories, or selling them to magazines for the (very low) magazine rate. Few read magazines anymore so you can instead develop fans with free samples.
It's very unlikely that the pirated copies are changing the bottom line in any meaningful way. It's just as likely they are bringing in more fans and sales as it is that sales are being lost. It's entirely possible that without the free advertising of the piracy she only sells 5 hard copies a week instead of 10.
Ignoring the rest of your post, the Kindle basically solves the above problems. I can read for hours with it, whereas I get fidgety reading a PDF on the computer in a few minutes, and my eyes feel tired as well.
The reasons why, before the "also", I stated "I don't own an ereader and don't plan to get one." are not stated. They are:
I tried a Kindle and found the user interface difficult, the speed slow, and did not like the markup options. The battery stuff is also an issue, as is the cost. I can't read 100 books at once so there is no point to being able to carry 100 books with me.
Hard copies are so much better for me there's no comparison.
Didn't mean to get into a discussion of preferences or technology, nor is this expanded comment meant to reflect in any way on what works for other people who obviously have different values and interests.
I was starting my previous comment with the preamble to briefly give some background to my claim that I own many printed books but no ebooks. This was because I wanted to establish I have no personal motivation or interest in whether ebooks are available of her work or not. The motivation of the comment was a criticism of elements of her article, such as comparing herself to a potentially best-selling author.