Tag Archives: books

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Do free ebooks actually affect the sales of paper books?

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We’ve had a good few years of activists like Cory Doctorow advocating the free digital book as a loss leader against the physical product, and in the last twelve months or so we’ve seen a distinct rise in the number of authors and publishers getting on board with the idea. The question is – is Doctorow right? Does giving it away make people more willing to pay?

Simon “Bloggasm” Owens has evidently been wondering the same thing, so he thought he’d chase up some of the authors who’ve recently had free versions of their novels released via Tor‘s mailing list. Tobias Buckell and John Scalzi both reported noticeable upticks in sales following their freebies, though fantasy author Daniel Abraham saw no change at all – neither up nor down.

Scalzi points out that it’s risky to make the results into science:

“… I don’t think that ‘scientifically’ is the standard required here; I think ‘heuristically’ is probably better. If you consistently see a rise in sales of an author’s work after the release of a free e-book, then heuristically you have a good idea it’s beneficial.“

But the telling thing is this:

“Every Tor author [Owens] spoke to for this article said they hoped the publisher would continue offering the ebooks even after the new site debut. When [he] asked them whether they would be willing to offer another book of theirs to the giveaway list there wasn’t a moment’s hesitation with their answers.”

So, we can’t be sure that giving away ebooks is a good thing, but we can say that few who’ve tried it think it’s a bad thing.

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The economics of book retailing

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Bookstore shelvesDepending on who you ask, recent changes in the book publishing landscape are either great news or a calamity. What’s not so certain is the cause of the change, but a blogger at The Economist has a theory – the same technological factors that have flattened the music industry sales curve have made the book market more spiky:

Our cultural consumption exists on a spectrum from “individual” to “collective”. Technology has shifted the balance for both books and music. Digital distribution and the iPod have made music consumption much more individualistic, while the internet and global branding have made book consumption increasingly collective.

This is very easy to blame on chain bookstore business models – there’s plenty of evidence to support the assertion. But as this piece at The Guardian points out, the boutique bookstore is still a viable proposition … again, counterintuitively, partly thanks to the internet (though it helps to have a strong brand identity from the outset):

Each independent has its own survival strategy. Ours has been to stock not just those titles our core customers would expect to find, but to second-guess those customers and offer books to surprise and excite them (what Gabriel Zaid calls “a fortunate encounter”). That in itself is not enough, which is why we set out from the very beginning to establish an involved community …

Still, at least fiction publishers can be thankful that – for the moment at least – the price of a novel isn’t high enough to make peer-to-peer piracy a serious threat. The same cannot be said for the $100 academic textbook, however. [first two links via Cheryl Morgan, latter link via Slashdot] [image by Soul Pusher]

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How much science knowledge do you need to write science fiction?

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Tom Swift Cover On her blog, author Jo Walton laments that:

I can’t write science fiction because I know both too much and not enough science.

I know too much to spout total crap and not care, and I don’t know enough to inherently get it right. So I can write it and be sort of right and I need to get it checked.

(Via io9.)

But getting it checked, she goes on to complain, slows her down so much that she can lose momentum and be unable to write the story at all:

The way I write, I inclue as I go along and plot develops as I go along and background develops out of that, and my understanding of the world develops (even if lots of it doesn’t end up on the page) and if half of what I think turns out to be wrong then it just gets to the point where it isn’t worth doing in the first place. The people who know science suggest alternatives that totally screw up what I wanted to do and why I wanted to do it, and I lose all confidence in it and decide I should stick to stuff I understand.

She then gives a specific example.

I know where she’s coming from: I got held up quite a bit on my most recent novel, Marseguro, while I tracked down the information I needed to ensure that my spaceship’s habitat ring rotated at the correct speed, given its diameter, to generate something approaching 1 G in the outermost layer–and that at the central core my characters could believably make the transition from non-rotating section to rotating section without getting their arms ripped off.

Non-SF writers never have to worry about stuff like that.

So: if you’re a writer, how much time do you devote to getting the science right, and if you’re a reader, how much accuracy do you demand? (Movies, of course, are a whole different kettle of fish where even non-SF films never get the physics right.)

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]science fiction, books, writing, novels[/tags]

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Writing and piracy – Stoddard pops Pogue’s balloon

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Did you read David Pogue’s post about why he doesn’t release electronic versions of his books?

“Unfortunately, I’ve had terrible experiences releasing my books in electronic form. Twice in my career, ‘blind’ people e-mailed me, requesting a PDF of one of my books. Both times, I sent one over–and both times, it was all over the piracy sites within 48 hours, free for anyone to download.

I’ve got a mortgage and three kids to put through college, and it broke my heart! Unfortunately, the bad apples have once again spoiled it for everyone else.”

Now watch as Jason Stoddard pops it with the pin of pragmatism:

“When Mr. Pogue hand-wrings about revenue lost to piracy, he uses his mortgage and his kids’ college bills to justify his income stream. He doesn’t talk about the value of his work, or the time he put into it, but instead resorts to a petty and rather petulant sense of entitlement. “I worked hard to get here! I deserve this moolah!”

Well, who says? Who says anyone has any right to any kind of revenue multiplication scheme?“

It’s not a story any creative worker who’s already making a good living wants to hear, but that doesn’t make it any less true. This isn’t some neo-hippie “information wants to be free” agenda either. It’s an observation, nothing more; the genie is out, and you can’t re-cork a bottle when the bottle itself has vanished.

Two choices present themselves: sit back and bitch as your business model dies around your ears, or search for a way forward. Piracy is progressive taxation; knowing as many hungry writers and musicians as I do, I feel that perhaps Mr Pogue should be proud that he’s well enough known (and his work well enough valued) that people want to pirate it.

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Science fiction series that suck

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Complete series of Nero Wolfe booksOver at io9, Charlie Jane Anders digs for the root cause of an accepted truism of genre (and, I think, all) writing: the longer a series gets, the more it starts to suck.

I guess you could put it down to the law of diminishing returns, which is far from being exclusive to media and entertainment. But whatever the cause, there are a number of cases where all but the most ardent uncritical fanboy starts thinking “you should have let it be”. [image by deadeyebart]

Anders uses the obvious (but extremely valid) example of the seemingly endless Dune saga; while I’ll agree that Frank Herbert‘s sequels were less than brilliant, their level of suck completely pales when held up against the Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson continuations.

Personally, as much as I’d jump in front of a speeding train for Douglas Adams it was plain to see by the last few Hitchhikers books that he should have moved on and focussed on some of his other ideas. Also, dreadful sequels and series in general are the main reason I gave up television completely eight years ago.

And if you want uncompromising sequel-rage, you should try asking Jonathan McCalmont about Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake books …

What are the sequels you love to hate? And which ones have you continued with – despite the suck?