my writing doesn't want to be free
Okay, here's another one of those posts that requires background. Steven Poole recently described on his blog what happened when he decided to give away a book he wrote some years ago. He put a PDF version online and allowed people to download it, adding a PayPal button in case anyone wanted to contribute — which of course almost no one did. David Pogue linked to Poole's post in a recent post of his own explaining why he doesn't want PDFs of his own books widely available: they then become too easily copied and distributed and he loses sales.
It didn't take long, of course, for the freetards (as Fake Steve likes to call them) to ride into the breach, swords held aloft, slashdotting on all sides, to condemn these superannuated dinosaurs: first in the comments to the original posts, and then in counter-posts like this one on TechDirt by Mike Masnick. But nobody, least of all Masnick, is answering the challenge that Poole put forth with admirable ciarity.
If the breathless advocates of "the free distribution of ideas" are serious, they need either a) to come up with a realistic proposal as to how I am to keep feeding myself while giving the fruits of my labours away for free; or b) come out and say honestly that they don't think any such thing as a "professional writer" ought to exist, and that I should just get a job like anyone else.
All Masnick can do is to call Poole's little experiment the "give it away and pray" approach, and to say several times that that's "not a business model." But about a quarter of the way into his post Poole had already said, "Clearly this is not any kind of business plan." Poole has simply asked what a business plan, for him as a writer, would look like — and to this Masnick has no answer at all.
When Poole points out — in response to the surprisingly common argument that bands, say, can give away their records for free and make money with live shows and t-shirt sales — that computer programmers don't program for free and sell mousepads on the side, Masnick replies, serenely, that that comparison doesn't apply because programmers get salaries. Well, precisely. But rock musicians don't. Freelance writers don't. This is Poole's point, and David Pogue's too. They write for a living, so if they make their writing available for free, how do they pay the bills? That's what Poole is asking, and what no one is answering. Masnick says, over and over, "You give away the infinite goods, not the scarce goods. Your time is a scarce good." Well, okay — but it takes Poole and Pogue time to write their books. Who's going to pay them for it, if they distribute their books for free? And if they're not supposed to be giving their books away, then what are they supposed to be giving away?
(Of course, David Pogue works for the Times and writes his Missing Manuals on the side, sort of, which led more than one of his commentators to call him greedy. Apparently some people think that if Pogue makes a living wage from the Times he therefore has an obligation to work nights and weekends writing books to give away.)
Poole's view is that the recent online distribution of music by Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails worked only because they had first established themselves as major acts under the traditional music business model. Masnick, by contrast, thinks that the real secret to those bands' success is the fancy boxed sets they provided for free, the downloadable music being a kind of loss leader. This strikes me as an insane argument, but even if it were true, Poole's question remains: so how does a writer do that?
By Masnick's logic, instead of writing a book on original sin for a mainstream publisher I should have made a PDF of it available for free — and do what to make money? Get a venture capitalist to bankroll a limited signed-and-numbered edition bound in vellum that I could sell for a thousand bucks a copy? Tell people who have downloaded the book that I'm available to do dramatic readings of selected chapters at fifteen thousand bucks a show? What? Poole, Pogue, and I — we're just asking.
UPDATE: I have just seen that Tim Lee has a post on this same topic.
You do this for free – it seems a little greedy of me to ask you to do to much more.
— Randy · May 27, 01:14 AM · #
I think you’ve perhaps misunderstood Masnick’s argument. As far as I can tell from his post, he’s not an “advocate” of the free distribution of ideas; rather, he’s simply making an observation about the market for digital (or digitizable) information. According to him, it’s not that such information “ought” or “wants” to be free, but that it for all intents and purposes is free (or will be more and more). Masnick is simply providing some ideas about how information producers might survive and thrive in this situation.
As far as your book deal is concerned, I imagine he’d not object to it at all but would simply suggest that such opportunities will become more and more limited as the digital age progresses.
— kenB · May 27, 02:02 AM · #
Randy, it’s true that I do this for free. I got into this gig because Reihan gave me the impression that he is a Nick Denton-like figure, only nice and free with his money. Boy was I misled.
kenB, the whole point of my post is that Masnick is not “simply providing some ideas about how information producers might survive and thrive in this situation.” Ideas are exactly what he doesn’t provide. He says that Poole and people like him need a business model but he doesn’t give any hints about what that might look like.
— Alan Jacobs · May 27, 03:17 AM · #
If I understand him correctly, Masnick’s hypothesis is that people like Alan will eventually find themselves out-competed by producers of substitute goods who find a way to crack the “free” problem in their industry.
It might be true, but as Alan points out, Masnick doesn’t put enough meat on the bones to make his hypothesis testable. (Like any good futurist, Masnick can just postpone the date of the apocalypse as necessary until one comes.)
— J Mann · May 27, 05:07 PM · #
I liked the Poole piece — in fact it’s not clear you really added to his eloquent explanation. That said I think Poole trips himself up — if he’d charged a minimum, he admits, he’d not have gotten many downloads at all. Which is to say, hell, even the existing, pre-Internet sales model isn’t going to work for him: what he’s writing isn’t of interest to most readers, I guess, and so they’re not going to pay any reasonable minimum for it. In which case, sure, the hell with it, having written it you might as well give it away, the time is a sunk cost. So I don’t know that he’s presenting a great example of what is nonetheless a real problem.
— Sanjay · May 27, 07:01 PM · #
Sanjay, a lot of people were interested enough to download Poole’s book, they just didn’t pay for it. Which leads me to something I forgot to say in my post: Poole did this with an eight-year-old book that had sold well but wasn’t making him money any more, so the lack of PayPal contributions is no real loss to him. But is there a gain? Possibly, if people who read the free book (and we don’t know how many who downloaded it read it) decide they like Poole’s writing and buy his next book. That’s not exactly a business model, but it’s a business idea. The problem would be figuring out whether anything like that actually happens.
— Alan Jacobs · May 28, 01:18 PM · #
On reflection, I have a relevant anecdote, although I can’t say precisely how it is relevant.
While Googling for reviews of His Dark Materials a year or so ago, I came across Alan’s review of Pullman’s work in Shaming the Devil. I read the whole review for free by (ab)using Amazon’s “search inside” feature. Based on that reading, I checked out a copy of the book from the library, and bought a copy of the book as a gift for my mother-in-law. So:
1) Alan, I don’t see it as a viable business model, but I can say for a fact that “giving away the infinite good” sold at least one book for you.
2) The whole book is great, but I particularly appreciate the review of Magnolia. It let me see the movie, the plagues, and the problem of evil in a new way. (Regarding the plagues, I don’t see how a modern reader can get past God hardening Pharoh’s heart without just ignoring it, but I’m working on it).
— J Mann · May 28, 01:23 PM · #
But, Alan, that’s the point. They were interested enough to download it — for free. What was it worth to them otherwise? Not much — by Poole’s own admission. There’s no business model for that.
— Sanjay · May 28, 01:27 PM · #
Thanks for the kind words, J — and for calling my attention to the “business model” Amazon created for me!
As you know, Sanjay, I agree that “there’s no business model for that.” But it still wouldn’t hurt to have more information, if we could get it without endangering someone’s financial well-being. Poole got 30,000 downloads of his free book, but we don’t know how many he would have gotten if he had used PayPal to make a little store and offered the book for five bucks. Or two bucks. And when Poole writes his next book, we won’t find out what would happen if he created that store and charged ten bucks for each download, because he won’t go that way. And you can’t blame him for that.
The people at 37signals sell their book online, but book sales are gravy for them; they make a living from their software. So that doesn’t help Poole. I’m just wondering whether there are any models that would work for someone in his situation.
— Alan Jacobs · May 28, 04:32 PM · #
Have you ever read Cory Doctorow’s take on this? Quoted from the introduction included in all the books he posts online for free:
Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money?
For me — for pretty much every writer — the big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity…Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy…By making my books available for free pass-along, I make it easy for people who love them to help other people love them.
What’s more, I don’t see ebooks as substitute for paper books for most people…The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper.
So ebooks sell print books. Every writer I’ve heard of who’s tried giving away ebooks to promote paper books has come back to do it again. That’s the commercial case for doing free ebooks.
— Michael · May 28, 05:29 PM · #
Or another way to think about it:
# people who didn’t buy your book because they never heard of it
(is much greater than) # of people who didn’t buy your book because they borrowed it from a library
(is much greater than) # of people who didn’t buy your book because they downloaded it.
Giving away your book as a free download is an advertisement for the physical book. The number of people who will borrow the book from a library before they decide whether to buy it probably completely dwarfs the number of people who will download it before they decide whether to buy it.
— Michael · May 28, 05:51 PM · #
One more point and I’ll quit.
Aren’t most academic authors (with the possible exception of stars like Alan) in the same situation as software engineers? That is, most of the renumeration they receive for publishing comes from grants, release time paid for by their university, and the salary increases that come with rank and tenure, with actual royalties from their books just a small fraction of that?
— Michael · May 28, 06:05 PM · #
Michael, yes, I would have mentioned Doctorow but the post was getting too long already. The question is whether Doctorow’s model — and that of a roughly parallel figure in music, Jonathan Coulton — is a viable approach for others or rather distinctive to him and his particular audience. That’s one of the things we don’t yet know.
Also: yes, most academics make little or no money from their books. I write mostly for a more general audience because that’s what I enjoy — but finances are part of the picture as well. As I’ve mentioned on this blog, my wife and I are teaching our son at home, which means that she doesn’t have the time to work outside the home, which means in turn that I have to supplement my salary. Writing is how I do that, and it’s a great gig for me. But if I couldn’t make money from writing, I’d have to do something else — teach an overload, or something.
(But “star”? Are you kidding me?)
— Alan Jacobs · May 28, 06:42 PM · #
I think you suggest one possibility, Alan. Publishers currently try to price discriminate on popular writing by selling the expensive hardcovers first, then the fancy trade paperbacks a while later, then the softcovers. You can get your book cheaper, but only if you wait.
Presumably, you could squeek out more revenue by continuing to drop the price as time went on, until it approached free. Maybe 5 years after the paperback comes out, Kindle copies drop to $2, and five years after that, you can get the book for free in electronic form with embedded advertising. It’s not the slashdot perfectly free world, but it gets close.
Another real world example, again involving me. I bought the 16th Honor Harrington space opera book, in hardcover, solely because it came with a cd that contained the previous 15 books in electronic form. I was unable to finish more than 100 pages and have never taken the CD out of the jacket, but that was the hook that got me to buy a hardcover book in a bookstore, which is pretty much unthinkable for a hardcore library card holder like myself. I would probably buy a hardcover book written by any writer I had heard good things about if it came with electronic copies of the previous 10 books.
— J Mann · May 28, 08:15 PM · #
Yeah, I think that if you make enough from publishing to really affect your finances, that makes you a star in the academic world. Or maybe we should just say (using Neal Stephenson’s classifications) it makes you a “Beowulf writer” (financed by the masses – although the author of Beowulf probably had to perform his work over and over to earn a meal rather than just writing it once and letting the royalties roll in) instead of purely a “Dante writer” (financed by a patron). Most academics are Dante writers.
But I think Doctorow’s points apply even more to a writer like you than a writer like him. Lots more bookstores carry his books than yours, so most people will only encounter your book if they are searching for it. And most people will only do that if they’ve read something else you wrote and liked it.
Making it easy for me to e-mail a copy of your book to 10 people who have never heard of you will possibly gain you some sales and almost certainly not lose you any. Or at least not any more than if I send them an e-mail saying “Alan Jacobs is great. You should borrow his latest book from the library and check it out.”
People will buy your book instead of just downloading it for the same reason people buy it instead of just checking it out from the library. It’s more convenient and you can loan your copy to friends (oops! more lost revenue!).
— Michael · May 28, 09:12 PM · #