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alexandraerinI know I said I would be weighing in more on this after tomorrow, but I have thoughts that won't die and they need to be written out.
As part of this discussion on e-book pricing, Catherynne Valente has a post up on her LJ. I think she's right about some things, including the failure of trying to analogize novel-length works to songs on iTunes. But I think the overall thrust of her post misses the mark.
In particular she speaks about the idea that writing is undervalued as an art, that authors are undervalued as artists. I think there are two different concepts at play here. One is the price that people are willing to pay for things. The other is the value we get for our work.
The first one seems to be the sticking point for Cat. I'm going to be possibly a little rude and use the price of one of her books as an example. Palimpsest. It costs $12 on Amazon Kindle. I paid that. If it wasn't the first book I bought for my Kindle, it was the third and if it was the third it's only because I bought two of her other books first. I own all three of these books in print. I just wanted take-anywhere copies, especially as I tend to lend my Cat Valente books out at the drop of a hat, and I drop a lot of hats.
(In fact, I have purchased three physical copies of Palimpsest and I'm not confident that any of them are in my possession.)
My point here is that I value this book. I value her work. A $12 sticker price is never going to give me pause if it's on a Cat Valente book.
But if you're reading this post on LJ, you only have to look at the side to see that one of my more commonly-used tags references her name. I'm a huge fan of her. Of course I'm going to pay $12 for her book.
But then we come to the second way that authors can be valued: the value given for work done. I.e., money. If Cat needs to know that someone out there will pay $12 for her books, I am here to tell her YES! They are worth that much. If she needed to hear that someone would pay $25 for them... well, I would buy fewer copies, but I mean fewer copies of each book. She would still have my business as a reader, though. I've paid $25 for books by worse authors because I wanted to read them OMGRITENAO.
But if that kind of intellectual satisfaction were all that an author needed, then we wouldn't be having a conversation about price and profit in the first place. And it's clear throughout Cat's post and comments that she's not talking about the intellectual satisfaction of knowing what price people would pay for her work individually. Her concern is the ability of authors to make a living at their craft.
And I share that concern. I think we should be able to make money doing what we do. But I don't think that an ever-decreasing floor on e-book prices must necessarily imperil that, nor do I think it reflects a lack of value-in-terms-of-worth on writing.
Yeah, there are some people who think writing is an easy gig, that anybody could write... it's just making stuff up, just stringing words together. Anybody could do that, right?
But that phenomenon is not unique to writing. We might as well call it "My Six Year Old Kid Could Do That Syndrome", and it's endemic to art as a whole. Authors do get called greedy and lazy sometimes, but so do musicians, and painters, and anybody who does intellectual or creative or intangible work.
I think I know where she's coming from in thinking this, though. I mean, I know what it's like to feel underappreciated, and I've certainly had my share of "You expect people to pay money for this?" trolls.
But the thing is: those are trolls, and no amount of individual people who don't see the value of my work in particular takes any money out of my pocket, or translates to a general trend of people who don't see the value of writing. If we're going to look at trends, we need some numbers.
In 2009, American publishers saw over eight billion dollars in net sales in "trades" (Source.), which unless you buy or sell textbooks is probably what you're thinking of when you think of books. Novels. Memoirs. Non-fiction history books for the general consumer.
Now this is net. I don't have any figures for the actual amount of money consumers spent (which must necessarily be higher), so let's just use that figure. Eight billion dollars.
That is more than $25 for every person in America... adult, child, and infant.
That is more than $1 for every human being extant on the planet.
Given this, I can't believe that we drastically undervalue authors or writing, as a society. But I know why it can seem that way if you're an author. If you're working for a living as an author (or you're working as an author and trying to make a living at it), you can't help but think not in terms of billions and billions of dollars but in terms of the dollars you're seeing.
And when you hear somebody complaining about the price of books, it can sound like they're saying that you don't deserve the dribs and drabs you get... but I don't think the average person realizes just how much smaller those billions become when they filter their way through the system and back to individual authors.
I mean, if you asked a person on the street who's not a writer and has no connection to the publishing industry or bookselling how much money an author makes off a book that costs $10, I'm sure they'd have some conception that the publisher gets a cut, and the retailer gets a cut, and so on. But look at that phrasing: these other entities, they get a cut.
But if the author has a royalty rate of 8%, 10%, or even 15%... all of which I've been given as examples of fairly generous royalties in the trad-pub world... then it becomes apparent that the author isn't giving anyone a cut of anything. Rather, it's the author who is graciously being allowed a cut of the proceeds.
8% of $10 is 80 cents. Not even a buck. When someone complains about paying $10 for a book, do you think they have any conception that the author may not see so much as a buck for it? It's got the author's name right on the front cover. There's an editor or two involved, sure, there's probably an agent in there somewhere, but their names aren't on the cover. The publisher's got a logo but it's practically invisible compared to the author's name.
Think about this. You write a book and it sells 10,000 copies at $10 a pop. And we'll say you have a 10% royalty. I'm just sticking with the nice, round numbers here for ease of math. This means $100,000 came out of consumers hands in exchange for copies of your book. Of that, you get $10,000. Which is nice. I mean, it's $10,000. But it's not much if you divide out the time you spent working to earn that, and of course if you're a published author you already know and understand that moving $100,000 or $200,000 worth of copies of books can feel pretty great but it's not going to buy you a house even in today's housing market.
But will it occur to the average person on the street... or the average book buyer who wonders if it isn't possible to bring the price of books down a little bit... that you, the author, the one person who is irreplaceable and indispensable in the creation of this particular book... would be given a mere 10% (or less!) for your participation in the exercise? Would they have any conception of standard industry practices like reserves against returns and other things that can delay or eat into an author's proceeds from the book?
So I don't think the drive for lower e-book prices speaks to people's regard for authors and writing. Even the people who think we don't deserve as much money for our work aren't saying that you don't deserve your percent of the book sale. They're looking at the price of books and assuming you're loaded.
Any discussion of the price of e-books should also address the way that authors get paid for (and/or maintain control of) the electronic rights of their work, but the answer can't be "...so that's why we can't lower the price." Discount e-books exist, and they are getting attention and they are moving up the Amazon rankings and making boatloads of money for their authors. The time is going to come when the e-book buying market doesn't see a book for 0.99-2.99 as a discount any more. $4.99 will probably wind up as a ceiling, with people paying $6-10 for books they really want by authors they know they don't mind paying extra for.
Publishers are going to be making moves to be ready for that day.
Authors should be ready, too. Hold on to your electronic rights. Fight for a better rate, and make sure there's an expiration date -- if it lasts as long as the book's "in print", that means forever and unless you become a rock star super sensation you will never get a chance to re-negotiate them when the next Amazon Kindle (70% royalty for books of $2.99-$9.99) or PayPal Microtransaction (net profit approximating out to 93% for transactions of around $5 and under) or whatever else breaks onto the market.
Let's look at a reality of today. If you sold electronic rights to your book a few years ago and you get, say, 20% of the list price of the book (that probably sounded generous a few years ago), and now your book is on Kindle. If your book is $10, the standard Kindle royalty schedule pays the rights-holder (your publisher) 35%, or $3.50, minus a few cents for "delivery costs". If your book is $5, the standard Kindle royalty schedule pays the rights-holder 70%, or $3.50, minus a few cents for "delivery costs".
But you? You get 20% of the list price. $2 when the book costs $10 and the publisher makes $3.50, $1 when the book costs $5 and the publisher makes $3.50. Heck, if the publisher drops it from $10 to $9.99, they almost double their profits. Yours goes down a 5th of a penny.
Is anybody actually stuck in that situation? I don't know. It really doesn't seem inconceivable. I'd have an easy time believing that contracts are still being signed today that bind authors into these situations.
And you know what? That's a lot worse to me than somebody who thinks $12 is too much to pay for what I think is a great novel.
To get more value from our work, we don't need to convince J. Random Reader that our work is worth more. We need to convince ourselves that it's worth more.
As part of this discussion on e-book pricing, Catherynne Valente has a post up on her LJ. I think she's right about some things, including the failure of trying to analogize novel-length works to songs on iTunes. But I think the overall thrust of her post misses the mark.
In particular she speaks about the idea that writing is undervalued as an art, that authors are undervalued as artists. I think there are two different concepts at play here. One is the price that people are willing to pay for things. The other is the value we get for our work.
The first one seems to be the sticking point for Cat. I'm going to be possibly a little rude and use the price of one of her books as an example. Palimpsest. It costs $12 on Amazon Kindle. I paid that. If it wasn't the first book I bought for my Kindle, it was the third and if it was the third it's only because I bought two of her other books first. I own all three of these books in print. I just wanted take-anywhere copies, especially as I tend to lend my Cat Valente books out at the drop of a hat, and I drop a lot of hats.
(In fact, I have purchased three physical copies of Palimpsest and I'm not confident that any of them are in my possession.)
My point here is that I value this book. I value her work. A $12 sticker price is never going to give me pause if it's on a Cat Valente book.
But if you're reading this post on LJ, you only have to look at the side to see that one of my more commonly-used tags references her name. I'm a huge fan of her. Of course I'm going to pay $12 for her book.
But then we come to the second way that authors can be valued: the value given for work done. I.e., money. If Cat needs to know that someone out there will pay $12 for her books, I am here to tell her YES! They are worth that much. If she needed to hear that someone would pay $25 for them... well, I would buy fewer copies, but I mean fewer copies of each book. She would still have my business as a reader, though. I've paid $25 for books by worse authors because I wanted to read them OMGRITENAO.
But if that kind of intellectual satisfaction were all that an author needed, then we wouldn't be having a conversation about price and profit in the first place. And it's clear throughout Cat's post and comments that she's not talking about the intellectual satisfaction of knowing what price people would pay for her work individually. Her concern is the ability of authors to make a living at their craft.
And I share that concern. I think we should be able to make money doing what we do. But I don't think that an ever-decreasing floor on e-book prices must necessarily imperil that, nor do I think it reflects a lack of value-in-terms-of-worth on writing.
Yeah, there are some people who think writing is an easy gig, that anybody could write... it's just making stuff up, just stringing words together. Anybody could do that, right?
But that phenomenon is not unique to writing. We might as well call it "My Six Year Old Kid Could Do That Syndrome", and it's endemic to art as a whole. Authors do get called greedy and lazy sometimes, but so do musicians, and painters, and anybody who does intellectual or creative or intangible work.
I think I know where she's coming from in thinking this, though. I mean, I know what it's like to feel underappreciated, and I've certainly had my share of "You expect people to pay money for this?" trolls.
But the thing is: those are trolls, and no amount of individual people who don't see the value of my work in particular takes any money out of my pocket, or translates to a general trend of people who don't see the value of writing. If we're going to look at trends, we need some numbers.
In 2009, American publishers saw over eight billion dollars in net sales in "trades" (Source.), which unless you buy or sell textbooks is probably what you're thinking of when you think of books. Novels. Memoirs. Non-fiction history books for the general consumer.
Now this is net. I don't have any figures for the actual amount of money consumers spent (which must necessarily be higher), so let's just use that figure. Eight billion dollars.
That is more than $25 for every person in America... adult, child, and infant.
That is more than $1 for every human being extant on the planet.
Given this, I can't believe that we drastically undervalue authors or writing, as a society. But I know why it can seem that way if you're an author. If you're working for a living as an author (or you're working as an author and trying to make a living at it), you can't help but think not in terms of billions and billions of dollars but in terms of the dollars you're seeing.
And when you hear somebody complaining about the price of books, it can sound like they're saying that you don't deserve the dribs and drabs you get... but I don't think the average person realizes just how much smaller those billions become when they filter their way through the system and back to individual authors.
I mean, if you asked a person on the street who's not a writer and has no connection to the publishing industry or bookselling how much money an author makes off a book that costs $10, I'm sure they'd have some conception that the publisher gets a cut, and the retailer gets a cut, and so on. But look at that phrasing: these other entities, they get a cut.
But if the author has a royalty rate of 8%, 10%, or even 15%... all of which I've been given as examples of fairly generous royalties in the trad-pub world... then it becomes apparent that the author isn't giving anyone a cut of anything. Rather, it's the author who is graciously being allowed a cut of the proceeds.
8% of $10 is 80 cents. Not even a buck. When someone complains about paying $10 for a book, do you think they have any conception that the author may not see so much as a buck for it? It's got the author's name right on the front cover. There's an editor or two involved, sure, there's probably an agent in there somewhere, but their names aren't on the cover. The publisher's got a logo but it's practically invisible compared to the author's name.
Think about this. You write a book and it sells 10,000 copies at $10 a pop. And we'll say you have a 10% royalty. I'm just sticking with the nice, round numbers here for ease of math. This means $100,000 came out of consumers hands in exchange for copies of your book. Of that, you get $10,000. Which is nice. I mean, it's $10,000. But it's not much if you divide out the time you spent working to earn that, and of course if you're a published author you already know and understand that moving $100,000 or $200,000 worth of copies of books can feel pretty great but it's not going to buy you a house even in today's housing market.
But will it occur to the average person on the street... or the average book buyer who wonders if it isn't possible to bring the price of books down a little bit... that you, the author, the one person who is irreplaceable and indispensable in the creation of this particular book... would be given a mere 10% (or less!) for your participation in the exercise? Would they have any conception of standard industry practices like reserves against returns and other things that can delay or eat into an author's proceeds from the book?
So I don't think the drive for lower e-book prices speaks to people's regard for authors and writing. Even the people who think we don't deserve as much money for our work aren't saying that you don't deserve your percent of the book sale. They're looking at the price of books and assuming you're loaded.
Any discussion of the price of e-books should also address the way that authors get paid for (and/or maintain control of) the electronic rights of their work, but the answer can't be "...so that's why we can't lower the price." Discount e-books exist, and they are getting attention and they are moving up the Amazon rankings and making boatloads of money for their authors. The time is going to come when the e-book buying market doesn't see a book for 0.99-2.99 as a discount any more. $4.99 will probably wind up as a ceiling, with people paying $6-10 for books they really want by authors they know they don't mind paying extra for.
Publishers are going to be making moves to be ready for that day.
Authors should be ready, too. Hold on to your electronic rights. Fight for a better rate, and make sure there's an expiration date -- if it lasts as long as the book's "in print", that means forever and unless you become a rock star super sensation you will never get a chance to re-negotiate them when the next Amazon Kindle (70% royalty for books of $2.99-$9.99) or PayPal Microtransaction (net profit approximating out to 93% for transactions of around $5 and under) or whatever else breaks onto the market.
Let's look at a reality of today. If you sold electronic rights to your book a few years ago and you get, say, 20% of the list price of the book (that probably sounded generous a few years ago), and now your book is on Kindle. If your book is $10, the standard Kindle royalty schedule pays the rights-holder (your publisher) 35%, or $3.50, minus a few cents for "delivery costs". If your book is $5, the standard Kindle royalty schedule pays the rights-holder 70%, or $3.50, minus a few cents for "delivery costs".
But you? You get 20% of the list price. $2 when the book costs $10 and the publisher makes $3.50, $1 when the book costs $5 and the publisher makes $3.50. Heck, if the publisher drops it from $10 to $9.99, they almost double their profits. Yours goes down a 5th of a penny.
Is anybody actually stuck in that situation? I don't know. It really doesn't seem inconceivable. I'd have an easy time believing that contracts are still being signed today that bind authors into these situations.
And you know what? That's a lot worse to me than somebody who thinks $12 is too much to pay for what I think is a great novel.
To get more value from our work, we don't need to convince J. Random Reader that our work is worth more. We need to convince ourselves that it's worth more.
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no subject
on 2011-03-21 12:48 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-03-21 07:42 pm (UTC)http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/33595/Interview_Reggie_FilsAime_On_Garage_Devs_And_The_Value_Of_Software.php
In short, Nintendo doesn't want to work with 'garage developers' of games, and feels that low prices (as I read it) 'train users that games have no value'. FWIW.
no subject
on 2011-03-21 10:41 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-03-22 04:22 am (UTC)