On downloading books: “Free” Books Aren’t Free
anywherebeyond.livejournal.com
anywherebeyond.livejournal.com
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.
"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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
(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.
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.
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.