It’s hard not to hate Dan Brown

But we should try. I mean, unless you know something I don’t – I assume he’s a perfectly pleasant guy. But it’s pretty much Dan Brown, then everyone else (See here via here).  Of course we’ll be at least a little annoyed at the guy who’s lapping the field.

And of course, we tell ourselves we don’t think this way, but we really do – we secretly maintain that anyone that popular can’t be any good.  If it appeals that strongly to the unwashed masses, it must be beneath us, the civilized and knowing.

The question comes down to, “Is Dan Brown’s success good or bad for other authors?”  It appears that, as his sales go up, overall sales are going down.  Dan Brown is an ever-increasing piece of a shrinking pie.  When the US economy turns around, maybe the pie will expand a bit again.  But for now, it’s his world.

Maybe I’m an optimist, but I think his success is good for authors.

He’s proving that people will buy (and perhaps more importantly, read) books if you get them excited.  Some may complain that it’s only the very biggest and most popular writers who are getting this kind of marketing and attention, and that the lesser-known authors are being ignored.  This may be true, but I choose to see that as opportunity rather than tragedy.  People are buying books.  If they aren’t buying yours, maybe you aren’t getting them excited enough.  But that means there’s something you can do.

If no one is buying any books, then authors are in trouble.  But if people are buying books, just not yours, then you have opportunity.  You can do a better job of selling your book, of promoting your book.  Maybe you even write a better book.  But you can do something.

I wish Dan Brown the best, though he doesn’t seem to need it.  And I’m excited about the opportunity to get people excited about books not by Dan Brown.

Word count limits don’t have to happen

I’ve been thinking about this post for a while.

I would say that the absolute upper limit of OK is 100,000 for a debut novel, but you’ll find some people turned off to it if it’s anything above 80,000.

I’m not making these numbers up from my experience–I’ve read identical stats on a lot of agent blogs. It’s pretty much an industry standard.

There is effectively a hard cap on the number of words you can have in your debut novel.  More words equals more expensive to print, and a new author is too risky.

That sucks.

Let’s assume that we’re talking about a book that 1) would have a reasonable audience if it were published, and 2) would be significantly harmed by chopping words off until it got under the cap.  That is, this cap is the only thing keeping it from being published.  So how do we fix this?  How do we get these books out where the author can make some money, and people can experience a book from a new author?

Well, the simple answer is to remove the risk.

Luckily, digital distribution and print-on-demand makes it much easier to do just that.  The up front costs are much lower, which allows the non-traditional publisher to take risks that a traditional publisher couldn’t dream of.  There are no expensive print runs, or extra books to be pulped.

If you’re interested, let us know.  We’re still on track for a November launch of ManfredMacx.com, and we’d love to talk to interested authors.

Using free to sell more

My last post got linked with a very flattering writeup on Techdirt, which is pretty awesome.  The conversation in the comments, however, is a bit disappointing.  A lot of people still think that giving away the infinite goods means you give away everything.  They think that by giving away the content, you make it impossible to make any money on anything related to the content.

This is completely untrue.  There many differences between scarce and non-scarce goods.  The important one here is that the marginal cost (the cost to make one additional unit) of a scarce good is greater than zero, while the marginal cost of a non-scarce good is either zero, or close enough to zero to no longer matter.

Cheap or free goods have always been used to increase the value of more expensive goods.  For example, I worked at Boater’s World in Annapolis in high school.  One of my managers used to tell the young associates, “Whenever someone drinks a soda or a beer on the Chesapeake Bay, I want it to be in a Boater’s World can coozie“.  He gave them away all the time to good customers, or to someone making a large purchase.  The can coozies are cheap – Boater’s World charges 99 cents, so I imagine they cost something like 25 cents.  But sometimes a free coozie is just the thing someone needs to decide to buy that expensive new fishfinder.  And it’s always good to have things out there advertising the name of your business.

Of course, Boater’s World loses some money by giving the coozies away.  But in return, they have a sale on a larger item, and a satisfied customer, and marketing materials out where people can see them.  Even if you make the false assumption that every coozie you give away is a lost sale, meaning the marginal cost to the store is 99 cents rather than 25, it doesn’t take many large purchases by happy customers to recoup the losses.

But does giving away the coozies prevent all sales of anything else?  Of course not.  It also doesn’t force Boater’s World and all of its suppliers out of business.  And this is a situation where the marginal cost of the giveaway item is greater than zero, so the store does take a real loss when it gives them away.  Imagine how much better it would be for Boater’s World if the coozies cost them nothing to produce?

Infinite goods and artificial scarcity

It’s no secret that I read Techdirt a lot. I think they have a lot of good ideas, and a good attitude about things.  A lot of the ideas behind Manfred Macx are ideas that Techdirt talks about all the time.

I was arguing with a friend about this article, which talks about creating artificial scarcity in place of something in infinite supply.  They give an analogy – what if we had Star Trek replicators for food, so everyone in the world could always have enough food, and no one would have to pay for it?  Who, then, would take this food away from the starving?  My friend argued that this would be terrible, taking jobs from everyone who works in the food industry.

Unfortunately, it’s not a very good analogy.  There’s no real substitute for food – people have to eat.  Whether or not you consider  high-fructose corn syrup to be food, you can’t escape the need for calories to survive.  For the analogy to hold, we’d have to replace the entire music industry, or the entire publishing industry, with something free. No one is talking about doing this.

A better analogy would be if the replicator only made tomatoes.  You could have as many tomatoes as you wanted, they’d always be perfect and delicious, and they’d always be free.  This would put tomato farmers out of business. But these tomato farmers could likely start growing something else instead.  And what happens to the rest of the economy?  Pizza and pasta restaurants suddenly find that a major ingredient in many of their dishes just became free.  Now, for the same dish, they can charge less, or buy higher quality ingredients, or make more profit.  And if you’re a really talented cook specializing in tomatoes?  Your skills are now in very high demand.

And there is still a demand for the people who bring the tomatoes from the replicator to your table.  There is still a demand for the person who stews and cans the tomatoes, or dices and seasons them.  And all the other food items, the ones that aren’t in infitnite supply, still need people to produce, process, and distribute them.

This is what’s happening in the music industry, and starting to happen in the publishing industry.  Some parts of the industries are finding their functions obsolete.  Instead of looking at the money they could save with electronic distribution, and what good use they could put that money to, the industry is seeking new laws and regulations to limit the infinite supply so business can continue as usual.

Even if every single song, book, and movie was distributed digitally for free, there would still be a need for the music, publishing, and movie industries.  There would still be demand for editors, producers, marketers, and all sorts of other services that these industries have always provided.

Reasonable people aren’t calling for the abolition of the music, publishing, and movie industries.  They’re just asking these industries to look to the future, and stop trying to limit supply to protect obsolete business models.

Edit to add:  This post has been translated to Spanish by a reader.  My Spanish isn’t good enough to read the whole thing, but the parts I understand look good.

Introducing Manfred Macx

It gives me great pleasure to introduce you all to Manfred Macx, a new kind of publishing company.  It’s not a new idea – bands big and small have been doing it for a while, and authors are just starting to try.  But as more and more of our media of all kinds is being distributed digitally, where making an extra copy (or a thousand) is nearly instantaneous and effectively free, we have to rethink the way we compensate creators of content.

At Manfred Macx, the author has a book, and the author has a goal, a target dollar amount that unlocks the electronic version of the book.  The author can sell almost anything;  Paper copies of the book, dinner with the author at a fancy restaurant, a character in the book named after you – whatever.  When the target goal is reached, everyone gets the ebook.

Beyond that, Manfred Macx is creating a community around authors and fans, fostering communication and connection in ways that weren’t possible before the internet changed our lives.

Watch this space for updates, or sign up for the mailing list.  We’re looking for authors right now, and expect the site to go live in November.

Something better this way comes

You probably think this blog is abandoned.  It is not, really, though it is on extended hiatus.

When it returns, which I hope will be early fall, 2009, it will be more than a blog.  It will address some of the ways in which the publishing industry is horribly broken.  I will explain what’s been keeping me busy since I last posted, and why it’s more important to me than keeping up with the blogging.

This is the sort of thing that will make ereaders work

One of the big problems with ereaders is the cost.  Even if you get a great deal on the reader itself, you’re still stuck paying the exorbitant prices that Amazon and the like charge if you actually want to read a recent book.

The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials.

Manuscripts, rare books, significant cultural materials – these are the things that are in danger of being lost, things that only exist on paper.  While it’s great to have a paper copy of something written or printed long ago, in the end it’s the content that’s important, and the permanence of the content that’s more important still.

And all for free?  Some time in the not-too-distant future, we’ll see a day when the quality and quantity of free content for ebook readers will make companies like Amazon rethink the way they do business, and maybe even start charging for the real scarcities while giving away the infinite.

World Digital Library via TeleRead

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AT&T looking to monetize things

With the success of Amazon deal with Sprint on the Kindle’s always-on internet connection, it should come as no surprise that others are going to want to get in on the synergies.

“There’s a whole bunch of ways to monetize that type of device,” [head of emerging devices at AT&T Glenn] Lurie said in an interview with Bloomberg at the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas. “That’s coming, it’s coming fast,” he said. “We’re going to be part of it.”

This may be putting the cart before the horse – jumping into a market just because you see the dollar signs is a good way to lose your shirt – but doubtless AT&T has the money and the resources to do it right.  Whether they do or not remains to be seen.  Competition for the Kindle certainly won’t hurt consumers.

via AT&T May Enter E-Book Market, Dominated by Kindle Update2 – Bloomberg.com.

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The depressing same-ness of the ebook reader industry

This is what qualifies as news these days in the world of ebook readers.

As for features, the device is simple but practical: SD card support guarantees easy storage of eBooks and music it’s an MP3 players too, and Foxit, a company most famous for its lightweight PDF software, guarantees the device will read PDFs very well—a factor that help mitigate the reader’s lack of a Whispernet-type service.

So, this ebook reader is exciting because it’s sure to be really good at handling a file format that, while common, isn’t particularly well-suited for ebooks.

via Ebooks: $260 Foxit eSlick eBook Reader Makes Its Way to Cheapskate Readers.

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