Piracy as Promotion

[yovargas]

I suppose if the model changes that drastically then maybe editors could become guns for hire for authors wanting to get that extra edge in the free-for-all internet space.

[Primula Baggins]

But how do you know the book's been edited by someone competent and professional? Editors aren't famous, as a rule. Nor do most people care for the freelance life if they can have an office someone else pays for, health benefits, people to talk to and have lunch with, and the chance to work beside other people in their field.

The system you suggest would still be way too chaotic, and finding a new writer worth reading would literally be more trouble than it was worth. Given that there are lots of other ways for people to spend their entertainment time and dollars, I expect that books as mass entertainment would simply die. Granted that mass-entertainment-level books aren't mainstays of civilization, they do form a bed from which some pretty exquisite and important flowers grow. And I would be sad to think of humans losing the ability to read and imagine worlds they've never seen, alone with one other mind, the writer's.

[Frelga]

Editing is an interesting sidetopic, and I'd like to come back to it, but at the moment I thought of something else.

I don't use illegal free copies not so much because of legal issues but because I want to support the artists. For that reason, for instance, I bought new paperbacks of a certain budding science fiction writer. I wonder, to the writer, is there any difference between someone downloading an illegal e-book and buying a used printed book? The latter is perfectly legal, yet neither method ups the number of copies sold, and the writer gets no royalties either way.

[yovargas]

I've wondered the same thing because I still physically buy lots of CDs but almost always used.

[Primula Baggins]

Thanks, Frelga. They're out of print now, so someday they may be reeeeaaaalllllllly valuable.

I don't mind people buying my books used even when they are in print, emotionally because I love used books, and practically because I think a used book travels farther than an illegal download. People who buy used books often sell them back, meaning somebody else can find them.

Furthermore, the book is in the used-book store because someone bought it new; so I have been paid for that copy. I am not paid at any point for illegal PDFs and other electronic forms of my books.

[Holbytla]

I think studies have shown that giving away free downloads to songs actually increases sales, and I agree with that in my own experience. There have been a lot of CD's that I bought because I was able to get hooked on a song without having to invest money upfront. That really isn't any different than the way radio was/is. The exception being that there are songs that I don't mind having but don't like enough to pay for.

In any case, it is still legal to record what is broadcast over the airwaves. Why does the means of transferrance make one legal and the other not? That seems strange to me.

Artists should be rewarded for their efforts of course, and they will be in most cases. Sure there are people that will pirate whatever wherever, but there is also a flipside to that by giving material away and enticing sales in other areas. As strange as it sounds, that actually seems to work. The alternative is to spend millions of copyright protection, enforcement and whatever else. It may make more fiscal sense to give some material away for free.

The long and the short of this rambling, is that I agree with Alatar.

[Alatar]

Furthermore, the book is in the used-book store because someone bought it new; so I have been paid for that copy. I am not paid at any point for illegal PDFs and other electronic forms of my books.

Actually, the PDF was probably ripped from your ebook, so that was at least bought once, and you got a higher cut from the ebook than the paper one. On the flipside, one paperback purchase might be handed on to 4 or 5 people, while in the digital space its more likely to be 1 to 1000's.

So, Prim, I'm curious. This is where you make a living, so its of obvious concern to you. If we are to accept that the current model is dying, what then would you see as the best alternative? Will we have online only publishing? Where "publishing" becomes a synonynm for "this has been edited for publication". Will books be grouped by "publisher" in the online space, making the publisher a mark of quality?

To make a more equivalent example, in the gaming space, we have one of the largest and most lucrative markets in the world. You have publishing giants like Eä Games, Activision, Atari. Their games are made by smaller development houses who pour millions into their products. Then you have smaller, but still big business, independant companies. You have licensed developers. Finally, you have tiny companies working on Indie games. And in more recent times, the web-based games has started to flourish.

The biggest game of last year was Call of Duty: Black Ops. Here's the figures:

Call of Duty: Black Ops Vital Stats:
Cost to develop Call of Duty: Black Ops Estimated $18-28M USD
Release Day Sales 7M Units
Release Day Revenue $350,000,000
Approximate break even time after release 1.5 Hours*
Total Unit Sales 20,000,000 +/-
Total Revenue $1,000,000,000
Return On Investment* 4350%
Approximate Hours Logged By Gamers to Date 600,000,000

*Based on a development cost of $23,000,000
To put these numbers into prospective, if James Cameron enjoyed the same profit margin on Avatar as Activision's Call of Duty: Black Ops, then Avatar's $760M Gross would be closer to $33B, or the gross national product of a small Eastern Block Country.

Bear in mind, this is ignoring the massive piracy of this game. Literally, nobody needs to pay for this, yet they did.

On the opposite end of the scale we have something like "World of Goo" developed by two guys in their spare time over two years.

The story behind the making of the World of Goo is compelling. It’s the product of two guys, no money, and lots of hard work. The ex-Electronic Arts designer-developer duo, Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel, don’t even have a garage. Their game studio, called 2DBoy, is based out of any Wi-Fi enabled coffee shop in San Francisco they can squat in for the day. According to Carmel, World of Goo has been built with a budget of just $10,000 dollars, all of which comes from personal savings.

Now, for every "World of Goo" there are literally thousands of crapware titles, yet equally, there are behemoth productions like Daikatana that failed dismally despite the big name publisher and devs.

I still maintain that the cream rises to the top. I accept that its easier to knock out a 200 page novel using your diary and a spellchecker than it is to develop a game, so there's more chance of getting lost in the crowd, but there has to be a model that promotes good writing and punishes bad. We just haven't found it yet.

What is clear though, is that the current model is in denial. In the publishing industry terms we're in 2001, Napster has just been shut down and Apple has released the iPod.

10 years on, look at how much the music industry has had to adapt. I expect the eBook publishing space to change more and faster. Where will we be in 2021?

[axordil]

I still maintain that the cream rises to the top. I accept that its easier to knock out a 200 page novel using your diary and a spellchecker than it is to develop a game, so there's more chance of getting lost in the crowd, but there has to be a model that promotes good writing and punishes bad. We just haven't found it yet.

Interesting, interesting. I think you have come upon a better analogy than music or movies, in that games are, like books, interactive and (if any good) repeatable.

There's a website several of my local writer friends have published fiction of various lengths with, untreedreads.com The people who operate the site act as a publisher would, gatekeeping, editing, promoting, et al. The editing isn't as robust as Maxwell Perkins, but it's there.

The business model is still working out kinks, but it's basically a royalty system with a hefty cut to the author.

One beneficiary of all this might be the short story and novella, if they can be sold via the same distribution method as e-novels.

[Primula Baggins]

There will still be publishers (not "publishers," the real thing and probably the same companies) operating in the e-book sphere. The model I see working is ebooks with a print-on-demand feature that produces a readable book that's worth keeping.

Yes, games are a different model from books. The monster hit end may be similar, at least in publicists' dreams, but there is a much wider variety at the other end of the scale with books. The game industry does not put out 10,000 games a year in the knowledge that 9,850 of them are going to sell few copies and only to people with particular interests. This is partly a consequence of the fact that development costs are so much lower for a novel. It takes many, many hours of work from the writer, but at least at first, writers are willing to do this on spec, unpaid.

The rest of the process takes maybe a week in all of an editor's time and about the same amount for a copyeditor and proofreader, plus more free time from the author to make revisions, approve copyediting, read proofs, etc. So in a way the system is set up to provide a relatively low threshold for people trying to sell their first book. (It's still pretty high, but the quality issue is important. Though it makes it harder even for better writers to get in, in my experience a good writer gets a deal eventually, if they don't give up.)

But this is what gives books the breadth of variety they have and constant flow of new writers, both of which are necessary because a book is one person's product and will not appeal equally to all readers. I don't know fans of any writer who only read books by that writer, even writers who can legitimately be said to be publishing categories in themselves such as Stephen King.

A model like Ax's web site ought to work well for shorter fiction, because all the existing models for that are lousy and it's something that seems made for the Internet, where people can find and follow writers they love with ease, buying their work story by story.

But again, in discussions of novel-length fiction I think the role of gatekeeping and editing gets shortchanged an awful lot by people who haven't seen what arrives at the gates (largely unreadable dreck), what gets through to find representation, what happens to it before it's submitted to publishers, and what the publishers do to make it better even after they buy it.

Quality fiction doesn't "float to the top." It gets found, and by experts, who then often spend more of their expertise making it better than it was. No random process of amassing amateur novels and seeing what happens is going to produce the same steady flow of reliably readable books as the current publishing model does.

(Yes, the current model also publishes crappy stuff. But that's because the goal is to publish things that sell, and in a lot of niches readers are perfectly happy with books that meet their expectations and go no farther. Where readers look for more, publishers can provide it.)

[Alatar]

Interesting Prim, and pretty much what I expected. However, I suspect the Games industry does "put out 10,000 games a year in the knowledge that 9,850 of them are going to sell few copies and only to people with particular interests".

There is a pretty huge pyramid structure under the Eä Games and Activisions of the world. At the bottom of that pile are literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of Indie devs, writing in their bedrooms for free, and hoping someday their game will get noticed. Next up are those who are charging a nominal fee through their own website, followed by those who are getting their game distributed on Steam or similar. Only at the very top of the pile do you have the big devs.

[Primula Baggins]

That's interesting, Alatar. I only see the games that are out in the big stores, so I didn't know that.

Games seem to be evolving toward a model like the book publishing industry, where the cost of developing the product is not the main expense.

I think as Ax pointed out earlier, though, the models will never be the same, because a game is used for longer and can be enjoyed repeatedly, whereas a book is typically read once by an individual and then set aside or passed on or discarded. They're not the same kind of product, and people who read books probably read many more of them than game players play games, per year.

[Teremia]

I saw this Neil Gaiman comment (it's going around the writers boards, no surprise there!), and my reaction is . . . it's all very well for him to say piracy just helps his stories reach readers! For those of us who are smaller fish, piracy could just nip our wee careers in the bud.

Gaiman is about as famous and multi-talented and award-winning as a writer could be. When he next produces a book, his publisher will snatch it right up, no matter what. He WILL earn a living, even a good living. So he can afford to be generous.

But he's a very nice guy, I hear, so I'm surprised he doesn't bother to point out that if you're NOT famous and well-paid already, piracy is just going to sap the number of copies sold -- which is THE NUMBER that determines whether your publisher will ever ever buy another book from you again.

In music, the whole model has shifted to musicians supporting themselves through live performance/tours (talking through my hat on that--just what I've heard on NPR!). What's the book-writing equivalent? Doesn't really exist. And there are five gazillion "books" being written at any time, so we really do need the publishing/editing structure if we want actually to reach readers. We need marketing and legitimacy. If books are just another thing we expect to be Totally Free, then that's the end for almost all writers.

signed,
Teremia-as-Harbinger-of-Doom
or rather, as someone who feels like she finally got invited to the party just as the bulldozers arrive to shut the whole thing down!

[yovargas]

I like the books/games analogy. Not perfect, of course, but there are interesting parallels. One interesting thing in gaming is that the internet has been a major boon for the small, indie developer. Before widespread internet use, a game like World of Goo - a game made by 2 people that garnered a ton of critical acclaim and success - would have found it nearly impossible to find a significant audience. Today, when you can download games like it to your Wii in a few minutes for a few bucks, WoG became a big hit for those 2 guys primarily by word-of-mouth talk about how cool it is.

[Primula Baggins]

You can always make a model sound appealing by pointing out one of its successes.

[yovargas]

That's a good point about music, Teremia, in that they have some alternate revenue source from touring, merchandise, and also some acts are doing well by licensing their music for TV and film. Games have the advantage that piracy can be very difficult, in some cases nearly impossible. Writers don't have either of those advantages at all.

[Frelga]

The problem is, there is hardly any mass marketing going on for most books. The only reason I bought the lovely books by a certan budding SF writer is because I know her from the boards. Otherwise, there is not a chance that these books would have crossed into my orbit. And while I certainly know when a new Pratchett is coming out (this October) it is only because I follow blogs and coms.

For a new author, there is virtually nothing beyond the book cover. No banner ads, no trailers. It's amazing that anyone sells anything at all!

I suppose some people follow a genre and so apprise themselves of promising newcomers. But I do think there may be a way to use the viral power of the web to put your work out there, and that way is almost certainly is by giving away some free stuff.

[axordil]

But I do think there may be a way to use the viral power of the web to put your work out there, and that way is almost certainly is by giving away some free stuff.

Or generating some kind of viral buzz. I was seriously considering running reproductions of artworks through a chipper shredder in front of a museum to publicize the novel I wrote and never sold with a related theme. I even got as far as venue shopping to see in which city I was least likely to get arrested doing so.

I don't think Philip Roth ever had to do that. But after seeing promos for a recent game of middle aged women reactly with disgust at the blood and shrapnel, I feel better about myself

[Voronwë the Faithful]

It almost goes without saying that not all best-selling authors agree with Gaiman. Here is a rather timely (in the context of this discussion) New York Times op-ed piece written by Scot Turow, Paul Aiken, and James Shapiro:

Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?

[vison]

The Bard would be writing for movies and TV.

[axordil]

No doubt. The only question is whether he'd work with the Coens or Bruckheimer.