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.
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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.