The downward spiral of value in ebooks. Over the last week or so, I've actually seen a number of ebooks being given away for free, as the authors try I imagine to desperately get some sales, and perhaps just drum up some attention for their other works.
I imagine the market will increasingly focus around the big sellers, the ones the supermarkets carry at discounted rates. And the rise of the gentleman-of-leisure author, the ones who can afford to write and not have to worry about sales.
And we'll probably see more of the Tom Clancy Presents style book, where they sell the work of other writers under a Big Name, and create Established Brands, in much the same way Hollywood is now locked into making remakes and sequels to established brands.
Until or unless writers can start doing gigs, and selling merchandise, they just can't survive books going down the path music has been going down the last 10 years.
Because no, I can't see a positive outlook either. Too many people are too used and comfortable with the idea of getting stuff for free on the internet, and they no longer see anything at all wrong with it.
I saw a horrifying tweet from an author a few months ago, where he said he was eating ramen noodles again because his book had sold 18 copies that week, and on pirate bay, he could see that 800 people had downloaded it that very day. He was, needless to say, not a happy chap.
I suspect the numbers I'm after are somewhere out there on the intersphere, but I wonder how many of those alleged 800 have even looked at the first page (yet)?
Back when I paid attention to the war3z types, the mentality was all about quantity, rather than actually using whichever 0-day copy of Delphi/Potatoshop. Similarly, one could go poking about other people's computers on the Napster/Soulseek and see piles of stuff that no rational person would want to listen to. It wasn't that whatever pop group were any good, it was all in the having. Like a mob of toddlers with bandwidth.
True, good point. I can imagine quite a few people downloading huge numbers of books to create libraries that they'll never read.
I've had friends with immense music libraries they've downloaded, and looking through the numbers of times they'd played stuff, thousands of song they'd never even listened to.
Well, not that strange given the intersection of spod and record-collector.
There was a lot more going outside and speaking to people involved when one had to beetle off to record fairs on the hunt for Joy Division bootlegs, obscure On-U releases and 'A guy called Gerald' 12-inchers.
These days, one can just sit on one's arse and roundly curse gormless American teens for not getting the metadata right. (It's not a bloody Depeche Mode rarity, it's a Canadian DJ doing a remix, etc.)
Thing is, there's a strong argument backed up by real people making quite a bit of money that now is actually an excellent time to sell actionable, advice-based non-fiction. Direct marketing backed up by a decent sales page has never been easier, and if you're selling an ebook yourself, you get 100% of the profits.
(As I've mentioned before, I personally know people making comfortable six figures this way).
However, fiction's trickier, partially because no-one's really figured out how to sell any kind of fiction on the 'net yet. (And I mean "sell" in the sense of "persuade people to pay money for"). Traditional sales pages don't work for fiction and never really have.
Having said that, I believe there are people making a seriously comfortable living off selling self-published fiction out there too. (I think you linked one of them a while ago?)
Finally - music and books might both be IP, but there's not the same pressure on both to go "hosepipe" always-available. A single music track lasts 3 minutes, which is one of the reasons people are reluctant to spent a pound on them. A novel lasts the average person, what, 5 or 6 hours? And it's impossible to read a novel in a "background noise" fashion.
All of which means I can get through a lot less books in a month than I can music tracks. Which means that given the choice between paying a fiver for one or twenty quid for unlimited access, I might well still go with option A. Spotify shows the same is very much not true for music.
A note here - the downside of the current climate for actionable non-fiction is that it's a very bad time to try and write it if you're not willing to also learn a lot about sales and copywriting. That's certainly a problem.
Something that means people actually want the information in it. That could be self-help books, technical guides, business books, or even sufficiently compelling general-interest (or fiction - see Tucker Max) - anything that offers the reader a big enough benefit ("Yay, I can sell stuff better!", "Yay, I can now set up Apache 2!", "Yay, I now feel better about myself as a person thanks to this fascinating overview of Bolivian politics!") to get them off their arse to actually buy the book.
Or at least off one arse cheek to get their wallet out.
If those books were massive sellers then they'd be on Pirate Bay and people could get them for free. By energising a niche market you can get them to hand over cash for something that they see as giving them an advantage they cannot get for free. If an author outgrows that niche then they'll hit the point where their work becomes available for free and their revenue will go down.
However - do we actually have any examples of people who have suddenly seen a massive drop-off in cash flow thanks to piracy? Most superstar authors still seem to be doing OK.
(Not trying to destroy the argument, geninuely interested. I think your niche idea is a valuable one.)
I have no idea what the sales figures for major authors are like, and whether they are taking much of a hit from piracy at this point.
Hard to tell, I'd guess, as you can't really compare sales across different books for the same author. You'd have to look at (say) the sales across the NY Times bestsellers year-on-year and see if they dipped.
The thing is that ereaders, successful as they are, haven't yet taken a massive bite out of the book market, so far as I know. There are, what, 12-15 million Kindles out there, and maybe the same again of other ebook readers? Compare that to the number of MP3 players on the market. If ebook readers become the norm then the market will be quite different to a situation where ebooks are only a small fraction of the book market.
I'd love to know the extent to which wikipedia is affecting the sales of non-fiction books, given how many students both at universities and high schools, are now no longer needing to purchase text books, and just going to wikipedia for their research.
Apparently it's a lot more common in schools, where teachers are reluctant to fail too many of their classes because it looks bad on the league tables. But that's just anecdotal.
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The trend is indeed towards zero.
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I'm not seeing a positive outlook in the medium->long term...
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And we'll probably see more of the Tom Clancy Presents style book, where they sell the work of other writers under a Big Name, and create Established Brands, in much the same way Hollywood is now locked into making remakes and sequels to established brands.
Until or unless writers can start doing gigs, and selling merchandise, they just can't survive books going down the path music has been going down the last 10 years.
Because no, I can't see a positive outlook either. Too many people are too used and comfortable with the idea of getting stuff for free on the internet, and they no longer see anything at all wrong with it.
I saw a horrifying tweet from an author a few months ago, where he said he was eating ramen noodles again because his book had sold 18 copies that week, and on pirate bay, he could see that 800 people had downloaded it that very day. He was, needless to say, not a happy chap.
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I think. Maybe.
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I've had friends with immense music libraries they've downloaded, and looking through the numbers of times they'd played stuff, thousands of song they'd never even listened to.
Strange collector impulse at work.
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There was a lot more going outside and speaking to people involved when one had to beetle off to record fairs on the hunt for Joy Division bootlegs, obscure On-U releases and 'A guy called Gerald' 12-inchers.
These days, one can just sit on one's arse and roundly curse gormless American teens for not getting the metadata right. (It's not a bloody Depeche Mode rarity, it's a Canadian DJ doing a remix, etc.)
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(As I've mentioned before, I personally know people making comfortable six figures this way).
However, fiction's trickier, partially because no-one's really figured out how to sell any kind of fiction on the 'net yet. (And I mean "sell" in the sense of "persuade people to pay money for"). Traditional sales pages don't work for fiction and never really have.
Having said that, I believe there are people making a seriously comfortable living off selling self-published fiction out there too. (I think you linked one of them a while ago?)
Finally - music and books might both be IP, but there's not the same pressure on both to go "hosepipe" always-available. A single music track lasts 3 minutes, which is one of the reasons people are reluctant to spent a pound on them. A novel lasts the average person, what, 5 or 6 hours? And it's impossible to read a novel in a "background noise" fashion.
All of which means I can get through a lot less books in a month than I can music tracks. Which means that given the choice between paying a fiver for one or twenty quid for unlimited access, I might well still go with option A. Spotify shows the same is very much not true for music.
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Or at least off one arse cheek to get their wallet out.
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If those books were massive sellers then they'd be on Pirate Bay and people could get them for free. By energising a niche market you can get them to hand over cash for something that they see as giving them an advantage they cannot get for free. If an author outgrows that niche then they'll hit the point where their work becomes available for free and their revenue will go down.
Hmmmm.
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However - do we actually have any examples of people who have suddenly seen a massive drop-off in cash flow thanks to piracy? Most superstar authors still seem to be doing OK.
(Not trying to destroy the argument, geninuely interested. I think your niche idea is a valuable one.)
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Hard to tell, I'd guess, as you can't really compare sales across different books for the same author. You'd have to look at (say) the sales across the NY Times bestsellers year-on-year and see if they dipped.
The thing is that ereaders, successful as they are, haven't yet taken a massive bite out of the book market, so far as I know. There are, what, 12-15 million Kindles out there, and maybe the same again of other ebook readers? Compare that to the number of MP3 players on the market. If ebook readers become the norm then the market will be quite different to a situation where ebooks are only a small fraction of the book market.
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