Futurismic

Given that publishing economics are pretty topical at the moment, this video embedded in this post from GalleyCat last Thursday seems either alarmingly prescient or laughably silly, depending on your viewpoint.

Here’s the thesis in a nutshell: those mind-numbingly infuriating and spammy Farmville games your friends play on Facebook are surprisingly good at generating income for their creators, so publishers should take a leaf from the same book to spice up their own online offerings. The theory does come from the president of a company called Orca which specialises in developing virtual currencies for corporations, so a certain bias in favour of the idea is to be expected…

Here’s an excerpt (which I’ve excerpted in turn from GalleyCat’s post – yay, lazyweb!):

“They convert [virtual currencies] at prices that are not easily divided–one dollar gives you 33 credits [for example] … People don’t necessarily think, ‘it cost me 42-cents to send my friend a virtual beer.’ I think when the publishing industry starts thinking about how they chunk up content–whether it be articles or chapters–it shouldn’t be a debate of whether an article is worth one dollar or three dollars. An article should cost 43 credits.”

My immediate instinct is that this idea stinks, though that’s probably due to my kneejerk loathing of Farmville, Mafia Wars et al; maybe there’ll be a way to graft virtual currencies onto the publishing ecosystem without introducing the intrusive “social” aspects (read as “spamming”) and underhand pricing structures that seem to inform such games, which I suspect wouldn’t gel well with the book-buying demographic. But then again, if you get rid of those aspects of the system, you’ll probably never make a dime with it… so it’s back to the drawing board, I guess.

Sticking with the piracy theme for a moment (yeah, I know, so out of character, right?), here’s an article at TechRadar that features an interview with one George Walkley, head of digital developments for publishers Hachette UK, talking about ways in which the publishing industry has tried to learn from the spectacular blunders and ostrich impressions of the music recording industry – the issue of file format compatibility, for instance. [image by Eirik Newth]

Says Gary Marshall the journalist:

Digital downloads weren’t cheaper than CDs, and for now at least ebooks probably won’t be cheaper than print. That’s partly because most of the costs apply whether you publish a book on paper or on an iPhone, and it’s partly because of tax: “printed matter” books are zero rated for VAT, whereas electronic ones have to charge the full 17.5%.

It’s a weird anomaly, and if we were in the book business we’d be lobbying Alistair Darling like crazy to get electronic books treated the same as printed ones.

The challenge for publishing is to avoid being seen as greedy. In music, the debate quickly became characterised as The Man versus The Kids, where The Man was Bono, his celebrity mates and their filthy rich record companies.

In reality, most musicians are struggling to pay the rent, but that’s not what the average file sharer thinks.

This is very true… as is the article’s revelation that the book-buyer demographic and the music pirate demographic are very very different. But as a side note, I’d point out that almost all musicians (and, I suspect, the vast majority of novelists) have been struggling to pay the rent for decades, and that the exceptions to that norm – the Bonos and McCartneys and Rowlings of the world – have been enthroned on their disproportionate mountains of cash by the same business models that are now collapsing under the pressure of filesharing.

I’d even go so far as to say that the business models in question have gone some distance toward ensuring that the smaller names in music and writing can’t make a reasonable living wage at it; if there’s [x] amount of money sloshing round in the economy that people are willing to spend on entertainment, then the way that money is divided up between the entertainers is controlled by the distribution and publicity systems of the industries that publish them.

The utopian promise of The Long Tail is that the more obscure artists will have a better chance of being discovered by readers or listeners who will enjoy (and hence purchase) their work, while the megastars will wane to a more modest brightness as the monopoly control their publishers had over the formerly-limited channels of publicity and sales frontage is eroded. Whether that utopia arrives or not remains to be seen; personally, I think we’re headed in that direction, but it will take hard work from the publishers to avoid creating the black-market demand that buried the big record labels. I want to see the artists I enjoy get paid, and I’m happy to pay them… but the price has to be right, as does the share that goes to the creator. Walkley is wise to this, it seems:

“Copyright infringement cannot be prevented altogether, only reduced,” he says. Speaking personally, he says he’d like to see action against the most egregious offenders – but he also says that the key is to give consumers what they want.

“One of the most important things we can do is to make the purchase of legitimate ebooks as easy and as convenient as possible and produce a broad range of titles in digital formats,” Walkley says. It’s a lesson that took the music industry more than a decade to learn.

Amen. And right on the tail of that article comes an announcement from Amazon, wherein they try to sweeten the deal on Kindle-based ebook pricing for publishers:

Amazon.com [...] today announced details of a new program that will enable authors and publishers who use the Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) to earn a larger share of revenue from each Kindle book they sell. For each Kindle book sold, authors and publishers who choose the new 70 percent royalty option will receive 70 percent of list price, net of delivery costs. This new option will be in addition to and will not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option. This new 70 percent royalty option will become available on June 30, 2010.

Delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be $0.15/MB. At today’s median DTP file size of 368KB, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold. This new program can thus enable authors and publishers to make more money on every sale. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option.

It’s a generous offer, but it looks to me like Amazon wants to be the iTunes of books – which is an understandable business goal, certainly, but hinges on locking publishers and consumers alike into one proprietary and intrinsically limited hardware platform. I suspect that once Steve Jobs has delivered his next sermon to the Fapple faithful, and the much-vaunted Tablet paves the way for cheaper and more open equivalent hardware, the range of affordable and open devices upon which ebooks can be read comfortably will mushroom.

Will the publishers be ready with the right formats at the right price? Will the book-buying demographic be more willing to compromise than the BitTorrent kids? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

[ Full disclosure: I have done freelance work for Hachette UK, and George Walkley is an acquaintance of mine. ]

OK, here’s another link-collection post, but there’s more of a theme to this one: I noticed I had a whole bunch of pieces about the economics of publishing, so why not shove ‘em together and see what juxtapositions we get?

We’ll start with this article discovered at TechDirt, an impassioned rant from a librarian that responds initially to the American Booksellers Association and their anger at big-box stores for deep-discounting books:

In order to draw customer into their stores, Target and Wal-Mart are making ten bestselling author’s books available for under ten bucks. (Wisconsin is missing all the excitement—they have a law against dumping goods below wholesale prices —but Amazon has joined in the fray, so Wisconsinites can still go online and pre-order bestsellers at low-low prices.)

The American Booksellers Association has even asked the Department of Justice to intervene. [...] But I’m also taken aback by the horrified response of the book industry. I thought the big crisis was that nobody reads. Now it turns out the problem is that books are so popular with the masses they’re being used as bait to draw in shoppers.

Come on, guys, get your story straight! Which is it?

Reminiscent of ebook pricing and the strange circular logics that emerge when it is discussed, no? There’s lots more good stuff in there, too, about the internet and libraries, peer-reviewed journals and the true value of information (as defined by its accessibility)… as a former library employee who was permanently frustrated by upper-management attitudes to changing technologies, it’s nice to see some common sense being spoken aloud in that sphere.

Ever wondered how much a “best-selling” author makes from a book? It’s less than you might think, especially if you’re not Stephen King or J K Rowling; via BoingBoing, here’s Lynn Viehl running the numbers on her latest novel:

So how much money have I made from my Times bestseller? Depending on the type of sale, I gross 6-8 percent of the cover price of $7.99. After paying taxes, commission to my agent and covering my expenses, my net profit on the book currently stands at $24,517.36, which is actually pretty good since on average I generally net about 30-40 percent of my advance. Unless something triggers an unexpected spike in my sales, I don’t expect to see any additional profit from this book coming in for at least another year or two.

My income per book always reminds me of how tough it is to make at living at this gig, especially for writers who only produce one book per year. If I did the same, and my one book performed as well as TF, and my family of four were solely dependent on my income, my net would be only around $2500.00 over the income level considered to be the US poverty threshold (based on 2008 figures.) Yep, we’d almost qualify for foodstamps.

Now, what happens to the remainders after a debut book has passed its initial “window of opportunity”? Sometimes they’re pulped, of course, but sometimes they’re sold off super-cheap. Via Ian Hocking comes a bit of soul searching from new author MFW Curran, who wonders which is the best outcome for writers:

Judging by the people walking out of the shop with armfuls of novels, if someone did buy The Secret War for £3, would it be such a hardship? True enough, I won’t get anything from that sale, but if it leads that reader to pick up another of my books, that must be good, mustn’t it? I myself have bought books from remainder shops and have then gone on to pay full price for another of that author’s books [...]

So this leads me to another question about “what price is a book to an author?” Especially a debut book? Can a writer bear to have a debut book sold for bugger-all if it will lead to a following? Is it worth it for no gain in the short term only for a longer term outlook?

With the rights to my books reverting to me around summer of next year, there is a question about where do I go from here in terms of publishing and many people have suggested self-publishing. But what of the first book? Should this go out gratis to entice people to buy the next two or three? Maybe as an e-book? It’s definitely something worth thinking about.

And while authors nervously joke about it, and friends and family may tease that they’ve seen your book in The Works or a similar remainder bookshop, you know, I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. Remainder bookshops may seem like a graveyard for novelists, but perhaps its just a new beginning or an opportunity.

Whatever gets it out there, right?

Looking at the music business, I’d suggest that giving as much as you can bear away for free is the way forward… but as has been pointed out to me many times, music and written fiction are very different businesses in some respects. That said, I think the freemium business model is going to be hard to escape, at least in the near- to middle-term; it’s unappealing to many publishers and writers alike, but there aren’t many other options on the table.

Finally, another link from MetaFilter, though one of more general application. The last couple of years have made me realise that I need to undestand a lot more about economics, not only as a writer but as someone who wants to understand how the world operates as a system; hence, I’ve added the History of Economic Thought website to my list of resources that I really need to get round to reading. The web design is very late-nineties retro, but the actual content looks pretty useful.

If you’ve any further recommendations of good introductory sources on economics (or comments on the articles above, natch), please drop a note in the comments!

Here’s some food for thought from occasional Guardian book-blogger and Clarion graduate Damien G Walter. We all know that the book retail industry is in a bit of a pickle on both sides of the pond, but have you considered that it’s one of the few cultural spheres which receives no government assistance? Perhaps the state should step in and support book retailing in the same way as it does theatres, concert halls and museums? Take it away, Damo:

… these problems are all symptomatic of a fundamental crisis at the heart of both book-selling and publishing. Books and reading, among the most fundamental cornerstones of our cultural (and hence spiritual) life, have in recent years been allowed to slide into existing as a purely commercial industry. In every other area of our cultural life, visual arts, theatre, TV, etc etc, we acknowledge the need for public subsidy to mitigate the less pleasant outcomes of commercialism. But because of their relatively strong commercial basis (theatre would long since have disappeared outside London without subsidy) bookshops and publishers have not made a case (and perhaps have never tried) to get support from the state.

Would Waterstones be better able to fulfil our cultural needs beyond selling books if it received subsidy to do so? Would independent bookshops flourish if they could access grants to support their existence?

Is it time that bookshops and publishers made the case for public subsidy?

The obvious response to this (at least from me) is “isn’t that what libraries are for?”, but the counter-response would be “yeah, and when’s the last time the government increased library budgets with a focus on enhancing the experience of readers rather than drop-in internet users and community groups?” Over here in the UK, that was an awfully long time ago… and despite the best efforts of library staff up and down the country (plus some of the more dedicated borrowers), the situation gets worse every year. So maybe a strong campaign for increased library funding would be a better plan than suggesting recently-successful businesses go to the state with cap in hand… there’s plenty of recent evidence that state bail-outs rarely work the way they’re supposed to, after all.

How do you think the book retail industry can be rescued – if indeed it can (or should) be?

Perhaps I haven’t been paying attention, but I haven’t seen news of this in the places I’d most have suspected to see it – apparently the estate of the late Isaac Asimov have given the go-ahead to a new sequel trilogy of books in the I, Robot canon, to be authored by Mickey Zucker Reichert [via SlashDot; image by ToastyKen].

Renai LeMay (author of the post linked to above) is pretty incensed by the idea:

Firstly, who the hell is Mickey Zucker Reichert? I’ve been reading science fiction and fantasy novels for the past three decades and I’ve never heard her name mentioned. To think that a low-profile author could do justice to some of the best-loved work by one of science fiction’s grand masters is simply preposterous.

Secondly, these books are absolute classics of the genre and stand on their own. As some of the first fiction to explore the possible ethical implications of relationships between robots and humans, they should be left on their own as a signpost in the genre. They should not be followed up and continued. Isaac Asimoc died forty years after they were first written. If he had wanted to follow them up, he would have. The author’s intentions need to be respected here.

This is one of the most ridiculous attempts I have yet seen in the speculative fiction genre to cash in on some of a dead author’s most famous work.

That’s some masterly bluster right there; I could almost hear the spit hitting my monitor. I’ve seen Reichert’s name about the place; while I’ve never read her stuff, she’s hardly an unknown. And as LeMay’s commenters point out, this is hardly the first time a similar posthumous cash-in move has been made on a popular science fiction franchise… hell, it’s not even the first time it’ll have happened to Asimov’s material. LeMay’s distress is understandable, but more than a little overstated, perhaps.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for other-author sequels. I thought the recent Dune additions were shamefully bad… but then they seem to sell rather well, so that opinion is evidently far from universal. But is it really that big a deal? Should we be defensive of the literary legacies of our favourite late authors on their behalf, or should we shrug off copyright exploitation for the inevitability that it is, and wait for reviews from sources we trust to determine whether to invest our time and money in the end result? Do bad sequels inevitably and irreversibly poison the original work, somehow?

A connected (and somewhat more contentious issue) is whether Asimov’s estate should be allowed to exploit his work in this manner. It’s one thing for his family to receive money from work Asimov did himself, but to receive money for work by someone else based around the ideas and characters he created is something rather different. You could look at it as something similar to commissioning (presumably) high-quality fan-fic on a profit-share basis, perhaps – completely legal, certainly, but a llittle more fuzzy from an ethical angle.

Any Asimov addicts in the audience? Will you be buying or boycotting Reichert’s robot books when they get published?