Tag Archives: marketing

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Pay attention, J K Rowling – fan-created content can work in your favour

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J K Rowling might be interested to see that suing people who make derivative works based on your own creations isn’t necessarily the best option. YA author Stephanie Myers Meyer took the opposite approach by encouraging her fans to produce a Lexicon of her Twilight Vampire books, and as a result has engendered a hard core of people who evangelise the books on her behalf. [via TechDirt]

Word-of-mouth is the best form of marketing there is, so they say – and getting someone else to do the hard work for you seems like a smart move in a networked world. As I’ve mentioned before, I think the importance of fan-fic in building an author’s career is set to increase over time, and it is in author attitudes to fan-created works that we’ll start seeing the split between writers who have embraced the internet and those who cling to the old paradigms of print.

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Buy this paragraph for $838.25

theI feel my leg being pulled, but The Avocado Papers is selling nonexclusive rights to canned opening paragraphs for $1.75 a word. The shortest is $122.50, pricey enough to motivate even the most blocked novelist to warm up with a few word-association exercises. The grafs they’ve posted are just OK, IMO. A better deal: The tireless Mur Lafferty offers a daily blog of ideas from Poughkeepsie under Creative Commons attribution. They’re strange, wonderful, and free.

[Story tip: Media Bistro; image: fazen]

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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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May Day giveaways – welcome to the new artist’s business model

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Cory Doctorow - Little BrotherAnother pair of sturdy nails were hammered into the coffin of old media business models yesterday.

First of all, Cory Doctorow released his new YA novel Little Brother …

“… as a free, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licensed download (in many formats).

It’s my first young adult novel, a book about hacker kids who use technology to claw the Bill of Rights back from the DHS. Neil Gaiman said of it, “I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year, and I’d want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can.”

There’s a bunch of cool stuff to accompany the downloads, including a remix gallery and a simple system for donating copies to libraries and schools.”

And on the same day, almost as if they’d conspired together*, Trent Reznor dropped The Slip – an entirely new Nine Inch Nails album – on an unsuspecting world.

Nine Inch Nails - The SlipNo build-up, no fanfare; just every flavour of audio format you could ask for (well, OK – no OGG), and a Creative Commons licence just like Doctorow’s book:

“… we encourage you to remix it, share it with your friends, post it on your blog, play it on your podcast, give it to strangers, etc.”

So that strange noise you may have heard yesterday was the sound of a thousand overpaid record executives wailing in horror; the sound of old business models crumbling under the weight of change.

This is the point where someone asks how it’s possible to make a living for the average artist without Doctorow or Reznor’s niche-superstar status. And I’ll be totally honest – I don’t know yet, though I have some ideas.

But I’ll tell you what I am sure of; I’m going to learn a lot more by watching what Doctorow and Reznor are doing than I’d learn by listening to the old guard complain that they’re not playing fair. I suspect you will, too, whatever you may think of their art.

[ * Doctorow protests innocence on this one; Reznor was unavailable for comment. 😉 ]