

Crime Writer Makes a Killing With 99 Cent E-Books - cwan
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/03/09/0618234/Crime-Writer-Makes-a-Killing-With-99-Cent-E-Books?from=fb

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muhfuhkuh
It's the return of the penny dreadful. Kids (and the young at heart) dreaming
of adventure and hack-n-slash violence read these cheap little pulp paperbacks
about horseback robbers and high seas pirate swashbucklers.

Two significant changes, now: It's had to adjust for inflation, but I think
the convenience of getting it beamed to your device instantaneously makes up
for it.

The second is that the overwhelming majority of the readership is women (in
the comments of the original interview, Locke suggests that his readership is
up to 80% women who fantasize, as they read his exploits, about "changing" the
protagonist for the better).

Welcome to the indie economy revolution. First they came for the apps (the
vast majority of the top 100 paid in the App Store and Marketplace are from
indie developers), 1-5 team houses that need only split their massive spoils a
few ways; and the numbers are massive if memory serves; something like $10000
a day for a top 10 game, and that's _after_ Apple's vig. And, those who choose
free with ads or freemium on Android, can see numbers approaching 1-5k per day
(unless you're Rovio, who claims about 35k a day from Angry Birds on Android.

The closest parallel I see to the App Store model is the arcade. Instead of a
quarter a play, you pay a buck, but you don't have to shlep over to the mall
to play with your friends since they're all on gamecenter or openfeint or
Facebook and you can pester them about your score on your wall), and for a
buck you get to keep the game.

It's still a gold rush, but with no end to the vein in sight because there are
people all over the world with a buck in their pocket ready to buy.

But just like anything in life, you can't be horrifically bad at it and expect
to make a killing.

~~~
Duff
I disagree -- it's cutting out the middleman. The actual author is making more
money and has more (ie. complete) editorial control over his art.

Cutting out the middleman means returning things like writing to a craft
rather than of an afterthought that is part of an industrial process of
creating books. Instead needing an army of buyers, marketers, agents, retail
placement specialists, etc, you return to the artist and his craft.

There will be alot of crap produced -- but then most bookstores are full of
crap books that have been filtered through literary agents and publishers. Do
you trust a technical answer from "Programming for Idiots" more than an answer
from Hacker News, just because some guy in NYC proofread the book?

~~~
electromagnetic
The author is only going to make more money if they're actually competent at
their job.

Basically, taking out editors and marketers is like taking the autotune out of
the music scene. If we actually knew what pop-singers sounded like, people
wouldn't be shilling out even $0.99 for a single.

The publishing industry has notably made authors question their actual ability
to write. Stephen King IIRC thought that his books were basically being
rubber-stamped solely because of his name (just like many Hollywood movies can
get green-lit solely because they've got a bankable actor in lead) and
submitted works for review under pseudonyms to see if agents and publishers
actually saw merit in the work.

Kindle is allowing people to make it by themselves, and solely by themselves,
which is awesome. However, I think book publishers are still going to be
around in a similar role for a long, long time mainly because they don't have
an authoritative hold on their market so they willingly adapt. I don't see my
legal right to sell a DVD/Blu-ray or CD/MP3 enshrined in the case, but look in
any book and the 2nd or 3rd page generally informs you of your legal right to
resell, lend or trade the book in a decent condition (AKA no pages missing,
front cover intact).

Book Publishers have survived the "piracy" of book trading for years, but you
see Hollywood, the recording industry and even video game makers trying to
block peoples right to resell or trade what they purchased, because the only
media we actually _own_ now are books.

~~~
rick888
"Basically, taking out editors and marketers"

When this becomes more popular and every publisher moves online, editors and
marketers will be in in demand, because it will be difficult to get anyone to
download/read your stuff without a marketing campaign behind it. The digital
market is still in its infancy.

"Book Publishers have survived the "piracy" of book trading for years"

They've survived traditional trading, because it's not much of a threat, and
it's physically limited. Anything digital can and is being pirated and as it
becomes easier and easier to get things for free, markets will suffer.

Newspapers have been the first real casualty and books will probably be next.

------
Semiapies
The actual, non-aggregated, article:
[http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/guest-post-by-john-
loc...](http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/guest-post-by-john-locke.html)

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lsb
There are always unintended consequences.

The entire book publishing industry is funded by sales by mystery and romance.
Make those easier to produce, and you lose the overhead to publish poetry, in
much the same way that most newspapers don't have the overhead to fund the
next Seymour Hersh disclosing the next My Lai or the next Abu Ghraib.

~~~
kenjackson
But doesn't the flip also occur. Now poetry has less overhead to publish, so
poets can publish their works w/o fighting a publisher.

Although I do wonder, who buys and reads poetry. I can honestly say that in my
entire life I don't think I know one person who does. I know a few people who
write poetry as a hobby, but I've never actually met anyone who reads it. And
I can't recall ever seeing someone on the subway reading a book of poetry.

~~~
lsb
I just bought Mary Oliver's Swan[1] and it's quite a great read.

Also, I wrote a paper in grad school comparing the Brothers Grimm's Fairy
Tales to Anne Sexton's Transformations[2] as Homer compared to Sappho, and
they are a _thauma widesthai_ , if you like Grimm stories reinterpreted by a
slightly unstable Bostonian feminist.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Swan-Poems-Prose-Mary-
Oliver/dp/080706...](http://www.amazon.com/Swan-Poems-Prose-Mary-
Oliver/dp/0807068993)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/Transformations-Anne-
Sexton/dp/0618083...](http://www.amazon.com/Transformations-Anne-
Sexton/dp/061808343X)

~~~
kenjackson
I hate to poke you like a speciman in my lab, but when and where do you read
poetry? In the evening do you read for hours or is it something you read on
occassion while waiting for the microwave to buzz?

~~~
lsb
One of the benefits of working 9-5 at a company that makes a million dollars a
day is that I have my weekends free. So I bike to Fresh Pond[1], to the
Arboretum[2], or elsewhere, and read. It's like meditation, and it improves
your vocabulary.

[1] <http://maps.google.com/maps?q=fresh+pond+02138> [2]
<http://maps.google.com/maps?q=arnold+arboretum+02130>

~~~
kenjackson
Sounds romantic. As an undergrad I set out to read Dante's Divine Comedy in
Italian one summer. What could be a better use of a summer -- and I'd learn
Italian at the same time. To this day I still haven't read it, nor do I know
Italian.

And oddly it does please me to know that there are people reading poetry
simply for pleasure.

~~~
officemonkey
You may want to give it a shot now. I'm translating one of my favorite Jules
Verne novels from French to English using vim and google translate
(<http://voyagesextraordinaires.tumblr.com/> if anyone cares). The machine
does a fairly crap translation and I then puzzle over the French until I
figure out what it means.

------
ChuckMcM
Great stuff. I agree its 'pulp fiction' in every sense of the word but its
also defining the marginal cost of the creative effort as defined by scale.

So if the author really clears $500K on a 'best seller', they can easily make
a living selling 3 - 4 'stories' a year once they are known. Plus there is the
long tail.

Will this promote a lot of crap into the market? Absolutely. Will this create
an economic opportunity for a crap filter? Absolutely. From 10,000 authors
wanting to be heard to 'king maker' publishers whose job is to provide a
selection along some theme or genre, an analog to Analog or Amazing Stories
for example.

Would an author be willing to give up 10% to the editor/curator? Who knows.
That isn't an economic transaction with a lot of history yet. But it will
happen, some new John Campbell of the world will emerge who can read 1,000 of
these stories a month and suggest the top 10 or 15 that are 'worth' reading.
If the average annual return on one of these stories is $50K and our editor
person gets $5K of that, then each month they add another $75K to their income
stream.

The next story in the series : "Editor makes a killing telling folks the good
stuff from the bad in the 99 cent e-book market."

~~~
andyv
Actually, its pulp fiction without the pulp!

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Zakharov
This guy made $227k largely because he has very little competition in the 99c
market. I don't think it's likely that "within 5 years, all digital books will
cost 99 cents"; unless e-reader ownership dramatically increases, the market
is not large enough to support the volume required to make many 99c books
profitable.

~~~
atgm
I disagree. He has made a lot of money in a 99-cent market populated by those
particular readers. There's nothing to say that there isn't a 99-cent
harlequin romance market, a 99-cent pulp sci-fi market, a 99-cent hard sci-fi
market, a 99-cent cookbook ma-- you get the idea. Sure, there will be a lot of
overlap in readers, but I don't think one or two people will flood all of
those markets anytime soon.

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DrStalker
I'm most interested in the comments about the effect of lowering the price to
99c. Personally the price point and ease of purchase is key for me; I'll pay
up to the cost of a cup of coffee for something if I think it will entertain
me for a few minutes.

As soon as the price point is over a cup of coffee I need to think for a
little bit if I care enough to buy something, and most of the time I don't
think it's worth the mental effort of deciding if I want something enough at
that point.

(As an interesting side note, indie PC games can cost two cups of coffee
before I need to think about their purchase. That's just the valuation I fell
into without planning.)

~~~
awj
Yeah, in that respect the choice of 99c is interesting. Amazon switches from
taking 70% of the price to taking 30% of the price at $2.99. Granted, we're
now coming down to "what do you mean by coffee", but that's still less than
your average somethingacchino at starbucks.

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luckyisgood
what do you think about this possible next step in e-book publishing:

people will start selling thousands of e-books (actually: longer articles),
all concentrating on popular, longtail keywords, and make a killing with that.

~~~
paulgb
This guy has done exactly that, even automating the authoring of the books
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_M._Parker>

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bkaid
The app store effect on pricing will be coming to ebooks. With e-books being
way overpriced (sometimes more than the print version), this has to be a good
thing for consumers and authors - at least to an extent.

~~~
Semiapies
I hope more ebook publishers (both individuals and companies) look at this.
There are too many outlets that think they can sell a file for most of the
price of a physical book - usually the same outlets that have been blaming
their price hikes on the rising cost of paper for the last 30 years.

~~~
sethg
The last time I saw this discussion go around the SF blogosphere, people close
to the industry said that very little of the cost of a book is actually tied
up in the _marginal_ cost of paper and shipping; most of it is overhead
associated with running a publishing company that can’t be economized away by
switching to e-books.

On the other hand, Kristine Kathryn Rusch said that one reason the overhead is
so high is that publishers locked themselves into long-term contracts for
things like Manhattan editorial offices and printers’ services, so they can’t
reduce their overheads until those contracts expire.

~~~
Semiapies
I'm particularly thinking of niche and hobby presses that don't _have_
Manhattan offices. Some of them have tried to straight-up sell ebooks at paper
prices.

