andrewducker | Interesting Links for 9-10-2011

"someone liked it, and it was edited" isn't a perfect system. But it's something

Indeed...

you said yourself that the Kindle charts are a mess at the moment.

I was thinking more of something like metacritic combining user ratings and critic reviews rather than sales charts.

there will be a slippage of people from the "Just about making it as a full-time author" category down into "part time author with a job to support them".

There may well be such a slippage but the more pronounced phenomenon will be the much much larger class of people who consider themselves an author (IMHO).

As in, more people will think of themselves as authors?

You're probably right. I think that we're nearing the point where a lot of people don't see a difference between bloggers and journalists, maybe authors will be next.

As in, more people will think of themselves as authors?

Exactly... A few years ago it was pretty clear. If you had a book deal you were a "published author", if not... well, a lot of people like to write. (I mean I know there were people who considered themselves "authors" despite never getting a publishing deal and in some cases never completing a book.)

Assuming that the distinction does break down even more I can see an expanding class of people who write and "get published" who earn only a few grand a year from it. Because so many people simply like writing (and no bad thing) there's bound to be a lot of such books on the market. I imagine this will lead to a lot of people who believe "authors make a living at writing, I am an author, what is wrong with the system that I do not make a living."

Vetting of quality is a bit of an issue in a market when anyone can self-publish, people will write for free and all ebooks cost $0.99.

I can see people making money as reviewers with popular review sites being able to sell advertising. Perhaps not a living but pocket money or free books for reviewers with a good reputation and a strong following. Also people making money selling new software that helps me find high quality books as defined by me easily. I like the idea of the meta-critic.

I do pay attention to the star ratings on Amazon but they do need to approached with caution. There are often marks given for the quality of the delivery service for example and I find people are reviewers struggle to differentiate between “This book was not to my taste but was well written.” And “This book was not really badly written.”

I think this is the part of the value chain that was previously done by sub-editors and publishers and for which they were paid a salary. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it needs to cost money now.

When I was growing up in Australian I had quite low pocket money and books were relatively expensive. I was very, very conservative in my purchasing but I read voraciously from the library. I quite like the idea of having books recommended to me by a variety of people and being able to take a punt on them because they are $0.99.

I can certainly see the value of the sub-editor part of things -- but then, with luck, people who are serious about their work would pay someone to do that role anyway... I'm not sure what value the publisher adds to the chain though (marketing and a nice cover?).

I quite like the idea of having books recommended to me by a variety of people and being able to take a punt on them because they are $0.99.

I must admit that these days, while I'm not well off, I'm sufficiently well off that I don't try to save money on book purchases... it's a good few hours of my life to read a book so I don't mind a few extra quid if I think it is a better book than the $0.99 or the free book. That said, if the $0.99 book is just as good and can be reliably recommended...

I'm not sure what value the publisher adds to the chain though (marketing and a nice cover?).

Um, publishing? Talking to the printer, getting your book to reviewers, getting it to distributors, arranging for it to appear in good places in shops, and taking the hit on the cost of all of that, so that the author doesn't have to pay to get their book onto the shelves?

Of course, some of that goes away with ebooks. And all of it goes away if you only want to appear on Kindle. But if you don't want to end up with a monoculture then you're going to want your book to appear on more than just Amazon, and that means dealing with distributors at the very least.

Sorry, yes... I mean in an e-book scenario where everyone can "publish" essentially for free (kindle merely simplifies the search problem, it's not at all difficult to set up an e-shop to sell your book and if you want to give away your book for free or just run a tip-box it's trivial).

Yes, there is a necessity for a publisher (or a lot of running around) in the dead tree format scenario.

it's not at all difficult to set up an e-shop

I'm going to assume you've largely dealt with authors of the technical variety. And not ones who find writing Word documents tricky enough, thank-you-very-much :->

*laugh* I assume these authors have friends though -- I wasn't assuming they would do it themselves. I know a lot of writers already found typewriters a little much technology for their taste.

Incidentally, I should be clear that I am not suggesting "everyone gets their friend to set up an e-shop" as a viable solution for the longer term but just pointing out that it's very easy to get around right now if you do have objections to "monoculture" (or "standardisation" as it's called when people want it to sound like a good thing).

"Standards" is not "Amazon tell you what to do, and you do it." We have an ebook standard - epub - and everyone in the world uses it except for Amazon.

Kindle is a standard in the same way that .doc is.

Heh... well as they say, the good thing about standards is that there are so many of them.

Kindle is a standard in the same way that .doc is.

Exactly... It may be closed, baroque and rubbish but it's far better than the situation which preceded it. .doc may be a hunk of junk but the world before that was people saying "I've sent it in WordPerfect format... you could buy a copy if you like... or you could have plain text."

Any standard widely used (even a crap one invented by evil people for the purposes of doing evil) is better than a bunch of free and open incompatible standards with no take up.

The Kindle standard is not widely used. The only company that uses it is Amazon. Everyone else uses ePub, which is generally well regarded, in my understanding.

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Yes - I think people who are serious about their work should hire a sub-editor. I would hope they did. I think for a new author they might have to cut them in on future royalties if they don't have the ready cash to pay a fee up front.

In the old days, in addition to their contribution to the final manuscript, I think publishers did some physical distribution co-ordination and provided a quality guarantee. I think the role of the quality guarantee is the one that is going to be hardest to replace.

Like you the price difference between $0.99 and $2.99 or $4.99 isn't likely to influence whether I spend the time on the book nearly as much as the quality is but in a world where price isn't necessarily an indicator of quality because sunk costs are low for the distributor I'm left wondering if I should take a punt on a book based on a particular recommendation. I would trust a recommendation from my dad more than I would some guy on a bus all things being equal. If the guy on the bus recommended a book that cost $0.99 I might be persuaded to try it out more readily than if it cost $4.99.

In fact, that's an interesting experiement right there. What is the premium I would pay for a book recommended by trusted source and a less trusted source?

It's funny that there are attempts to drive prices down to the bottom with ebooks and mp3s, but when it comes to shopping for, for example, clothes and food, people are known to not trust low-priced items. Look at the way Sainsbury put embarassingly defensive comments about their basics items on the packaging.

The Steam top sellers is, aside from on a big release week, often packed with things on sale.

I love the Sainsbury basic comments!

And there's always a niche for more expensive items, but it's Primark that's packed to capacity.

The question is whether price is a guide to quality in books. If it is then the divisions will stay. If you can get cheap books that are as good...

I like to think of Primark as using their pricing to be upfront that their clothes are of low quality materials and made in dubious conditions in countries with sometimes lax labour laws, as opposed to more expensive clothing shops that try to hide this with higher prices to give the illusion of quality and care.

To be fair, M&S clothes do tend to last longer.

Go pricier than that, and I bet some of them won't :-D

There's also the difference in the way people treat their clothes. Clothes from Primark can be treated as cheap and disposable but those £150 jeans that look exactly like the ones from Primark but with a big badge on them? Only dry cleaning for my beautiful jeans!

It must be really frustrating for Primark executives, not being able to just shout "HOW DO YOU THINK WE SELL THEM SO CHEAP?!"

I was terribly amused by this:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2025689/These-Choos-NOT-walking-The-425-designer-shoes-look-old-tatty-day-s-wear.html

That's part of the point of expensive shoes going back a century or two - it's to show you're so rich that you don't need to walk anywhere because your shoes are so fragile.

And, to be honest, in this case I'd say that the shoes were clearly designed to be used for standing around in nice hotels/function rooms, and not for wandering about on grassy surfaces.

Steam occurred to me as a comparison too.

With a movie, a TV series, or a computer game, they sell it at full price for a while, it is bought at that price for a while. Then when pretty much everyone who is likely to buy it at that price has done so, they drop the price, and more people buy it. It also comes from the fact that once they've paid off the cost of making it, every additional sale is more profit (assuming they don't go under the cost to actually make and distribute the thing).

It's a fairly basic bit of economics; that there are X people that will buy a product at Y price. You want to make the best profits, so looking at supply versus demand, you set your price to do so. But if you can charge different people different prices, then as long as you stay above the cost to make the thing, you're making more profit. This is why Young Persons Railcards exist, why it costs less to get tickets to things when a child, a student, or an OAP. Separating by time is just another division — the book industry already does that with hardback versus softback releases.

Now, the argument back against that is that books often have more staying power; that there isn't the march of technology, of special effects, thus they're still as good as when they were first released, whereas a year or two year old game can look a bit crap compared to a new one.

Still I do think that, whilst they'd lose out getting more money from those who discover it and would be willing to pay the full price, overall they'd benefit from far more people being willing to buy books when they're cheaper. I know with Steam, there are lots of games that I have that I absolutely would not have bought at full price, but have gotten a lot of fun out of them for my fiver (or whatever).

This comment is far too late, but: the embarrassingly defensive comments on the Sainsbury's Basics range is the point. They are trying to make you not trust them. They want people who can afford to spend more money on their groceries to avoid the Basic range - and embarrassment is a good way to do that.

Oddly, I find them actually reassuring. They cornish pastie one, for instance, tells you that the difference between it and a normal pastie is merely slightly less meat and slightly more veg. As that difference is a-ok by me, I'm happy with Sainsbury Basic Cornish Pasties.