Crime Writer Makes a Killing With 99 Cent E-Books
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Two significant changes, now: It's had to adjust for inflation, but I think the convenience of getting it beamed to your device instantaneously makes up for it.
The second is that the overwhelming majority of the readership is women (in the comments of the original interview, Locke suggests that his readership is up to 80% women who fantasize, as they read his exploits, about "changing" the protagonist for the better).
Welcome to the indie economy revolution. First they came for the apps (the vast majority of the top 100 paid in the App Store and Marketplace are from indie developers), 1-5 team houses that need only split their massive spoils a few ways; and the numbers are massive if memory serves; something like $10000 a day for a top 10 game, and that's _after_ Apple's vig. And, those who choose free with ads or freemium on Android, can see numbers approaching 1-5k per day (unless you're Rovio, who claims about 35k a day from Angry Birds on Android.
The closest parallel I see to the App Store model is the arcade. Instead of a quarter a play, you pay a buck, but you don't have to shlep over to the mall to play with your friends since they're all on gamecenter or openfeint or Facebook and you can pester them about your score on your wall), and for a buck you get to keep the game.
It's still a gold rush, but with no end to the vein in sight because there are people all over the world with a buck in their pocket ready to buy.
But just like anything in life, you can't be horrifically bad at it and expect to make a killing.
Cutting out the middleman means returning things like writing to a craft rather than of an afterthought that is part of an industrial process of creating books. Instead needing an army of buyers, marketers, agents, retail placement specialists, etc, you return to the artist and his craft.
There will be alot of crap produced -- but then most bookstores are full of crap books that have been filtered through literary agents and publishers. Do you trust a technical answer from "Programming for Idiots" more than an answer from Hacker News, just because some guy in NYC proofread the book?
edit: typo
Basically, taking out editors and marketers is like taking the autotune out of the music scene. If we actually knew what pop-singers sounded like, people wouldn't be shilling out even $0.99 for a single.
The publishing industry has notably made authors question their actual ability to write. Stephen King IIRC thought that his books were basically being rubber-stamped solely because of his name (just like many Hollywood movies can get green-lit solely because they've got a bankable actor in lead) and submitted works for review under pseudonyms to see if agents and publishers actually saw merit in the work.
Kindle is allowing people to make it by themselves, and solely by themselves, which is awesome. However, I think book publishers are still going to be around in a similar role for a long, long time mainly because they don't have an authoritative hold on their market so they willingly adapt. I don't see my legal right to sell a DVD/Blu-ray or CD/MP3 enshrined in the case, but look in any book and the 2nd or 3rd page generally informs you of your legal right to resell, lend or trade the book in a decent condition (AKA no pages missing, front cover intact).
Book Publishers have survived the "piracy" of book trading for years, but you see Hollywood, the recording industry and even video game makers trying to block peoples right to resell or trade what they purchased, because the only media we actually own now are books.
When this becomes more popular and every publisher moves online, editors and marketers will be in in demand, because it will be difficult to get anyone to download/read your stuff without a marketing campaign behind it. The digital market is still in its infancy.
"Book Publishers have survived the "piracy" of book trading for years"
They've survived traditional trading, because it's not much of a threat, and it's physically limited. Anything digital can and is being pirated and as it becomes easier and easier to get things for free, markets will suffer.
Newspapers have been the first real casualty and books will probably be next.
I don't know anything about publishing except for computer manuals and science fiction. Computer manuals are being slowly revolutionized, I think, by the Pragmatic Programmers (and their ~50% cut for authors, IIRC) and to a lesser extent O'Reilly.
In science fiction, the "middlemen" are perhaps slightly less exploitive than you suggest. The typical SF editor works in Manhattan for considerably less money than most of us make. The SF publishing houses, again, are not giant profit centers, and all but a few books generate modest profits. From where I'm standing, it's got "lifestyle business" written all over it.
Some authors, such as John Scalzi, are extremely happy to focus on writing, and not on contract negotiation, international sales, cover design, marketing, and so on. In economic terms, they're putting all of their working hours to the most profitable use, and farming everything else out to specialists. Or to put it in technology terms, they're like talented coders who dislike sales, marketing and management, and who just want to write code. Not everybody is an entrepreneur, including some people as business- and PR-savvy as Scalzi.
Plus, there are customers like me, who appreciate strong and talented editing. Karl Schroeder's novel Ventus had about 90,000 words cut from the second half at the recommendation of an editor, who said, roughly, The first half of the book is a lovely travelogue across a fascinating world; the second half is a mad race. You need to cut the travelogue stuff from the second half or you'll drive the reader nuts. By Schroeder's own admission, this advice improved the pace of the book tremendously.
Now, absolutely none of this is meant as a knock on people churning out penny-dreadful ebooks on the Kindle and making a killing. They're serving a real market need, and plenty of readers really want significant volume at an affordable price. In the military SF world, this need is mostly met by Baen's DRM-free webscriptions, which combine significant volume, low prices, and the occasional startlingly good novel.
The entire book publishing industry is funded by sales by mystery and romance. Make those easier to produce, and you lose the overhead to publish poetry, in much the same way that most newspapers don't have the overhead to fund the next Seymour Hersh disclosing the next My Lai or the next Abu Ghraib.
Although I do wonder, who buys and reads poetry. I can honestly say that in my entire life I don't think I know one person who does. I know a few people who write poetry as a hobby, but I've never actually met anyone who reads it. And I can't recall ever seeing someone on the subway reading a book of poetry.
Also, I wrote a paper in grad school comparing the Brothers Grimm's Fairy Tales to Anne Sexton's Transformations[2] as Homer compared to Sappho, and they are a thauma widesthai, if you like Grimm stories reinterpreted by a slightly unstable Bostonian feminist.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Swan-Poems-Prose-Mary-Oliver/dp/080706...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Transformations-Anne-Sexton/dp/0618083...
[1] http://maps.google.com/maps?q=fresh+pond+02138 [2] http://maps.google.com/maps?q=arnold+arboretum+02130
And oddly it does please me to know that there are people reading poetry simply for pleasure.
So if the author really clears $500K on a 'best seller', they can easily make a living selling 3 - 4 'stories' a year once they are known. Plus there is the long tail.
Will this promote a lot of crap into the market? Absolutely. Will this create an economic opportunity for a crap filter? Absolutely. From 10,000 authors wanting to be heard to 'king maker' publishers whose job is to provide a selection along some theme or genre, an analog to Analog or Amazing Stories for example.
Would an author be willing to give up 10% to the editor/curator? Who knows. That isn't an economic transaction with a lot of history yet. But it will happen, some new John Campbell of the world will emerge who can read 1,000 of these stories a month and suggest the top 10 or 15 that are 'worth' reading. If the average annual return on one of these stories is $50K and our editor person gets $5K of that, then each month they add another $75K to their income stream.
The next story in the series : "Editor makes a killing telling folks the good stuff from the bad in the 99 cent e-book market."
As soon as the price point is over a cup of coffee I need to think for a little bit if I care enough to buy something, and most of the time I don't think it's worth the mental effort of deciding if I want something enough at that point.
(As an interesting side note, indie PC games can cost two cups of coffee before I need to think about their purchase. That's just the valuation I fell into without planning.)
people will start selling thousands of e-books (actually: longer articles), all concentrating on popular, longtail keywords, and make a killing with that.
On the other hand, Kristine Kathryn Rusch said that one reason the overhead is so high is that publishers locked themselves into long-term contracts for things like Manhattan editorial offices and printers’ services, so they can’t reduce their overheads until those contracts expire.