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Comment by jgilliam | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

There is some background in this Washington Post article from 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08...

This story makes me sad because the author is trapped in an outdated business model and isn't likely to get out of it anytime soon.

How is she trapped - has she sold the rights to her forthcoming books in advance?

Overcoming an ingrained mentality is a much larger hurdle than a contract or two would be.

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.

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.

Techdirt often does case studies of people in various creative industries that have made this kind of thing work. See for example: http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20101026/0...

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/

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.

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.

He mentioned that he did it himself. Occasional success stories pop up on HN, too.

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.

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