[guyanonymous]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Sure writers are going to write, painters are going to paint, musicians are going to play music. BUT without mechanisms in place to allow those creatives to put food in the dog bowl by making money at what they do the potential for creating great works is severely hampered. Modern tools and technologies make it easy to blog or post pictures or music and every tom dick and harry that think they are a writer or musician or artist can post their work on a web page and call themselves an artist or writer or whatever.

The mechanisms exist/are emerging to allow for creatives to sell to the world. They aren't limited by borders (unless they choose to be), by payment mechanisms (CC/visa/bank transfers etc have taken care of that), and there are mechanisms that exist which allow independent creatives to share/sell their work. There are more creatives now than ever before...and while the 'dream' is to get rich according to society, I think that many creatives will be happy to make a good middle-class income, something very possible with 6 billion people to sell to and near-zero distribution/production costs (after original generation).

Someone mentioned earlier in the thread that the best thing novelists (creatives) could do for themselves is personalize their business - become known and a real entity to their potential customers. Communication, transparency, and honesty - these are things that promote trust and create a following.

While it was written somewhat in jest, the Monkeysphere article just may apply. If we know/care about someone, we treat them differently than those we don't know. Of all the thousands of books I've read in my life, the authors I actually know and care about are those who have communicated with the public - and they're the ones I feel like I have a relationship (albeit not direct) with and care about supporting. They're the ones involving the public in the writing process, making us feel <somewhat> a part of their creative process. Are they authors and creatives who are going to get rich (ala Tom Clancy)? Probably not, but they're ones who will likely make a comfortable middle class living being creative. Will they have publishers who are going to take 50-80% of their sales profits? No...they may have editors who they contract to (or provide a smaller percentage) etc. They may hire techs to operate their sites. They may hire PR people to promote online...but all this will be at a fraction of the % previously given to publishers. (Monkeysphere is based on a real theory... https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikiped...bar%27s_number)

With millions of creatives, and more being written and created every day than ever before, world-wide distribution being easy, fast, and cheap (near zero for digital media), the supply side is over-burdened unless artificial means of scarcity are enforced. When supply is too high, prices should drop as value has decreased. I argue that a book today does not have the same monetary value today, as a book from 10 years ago did then, and of course not as much as one 100 years or 500 years ago did 100 and 500 years ago, respectively. Yet publishers and authors are trying to tell us that an infinitely available product is worth more than ever. Until an adjustment in value, here, comes through, right or wrong, piracy will continue.

I'm starting to see articles about PC piracy claiming it has started to decline and that the industry hasn't actually been hurt by it. PC gaming has changed thanks to the advent of Steam (who experiment with price, provide convenience beyond a physical game, and still provide some DRM that makes content providers happy for the most part). Companies, small and large, are able to effectively sell and profit from the tail-end of their catalogue - the old games that normally were impossible to find after their original sales-period ended. I know that, for me, I buy 2-3 more games each year than I used to play before (and I only bought 20% of those before), and pirate no games any more for these very reasons. They've found price-points and convenience that works for me, and I'm happy to wait a few weeks or months to save some money for their frequent sales of new and old items alike. I've even purchased games that I'd pirated in the past because they made it easy for me.

The music industry has gone through similar changes with iTunes, Amazon, and others, providing a more convenient way to buy music and a price point (individual songs) that people will pay easily. (I still think $0.99/song is too high, but that's just for me...)

Hell, even Apple has done something with tiny apps that nobody had really done before. Shareware/postcardware/etc...the games and programs that cost less than $10 now have a viable new outlet that provides more views and more potential sales than ever before - along with convenience for the consumer/seller, and price points that people will pay on a whim. They've created/changed an industry into something viable and mainstream.

Here's [url=http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html\an older article from Wired[/url] on the long tail effect. It's predicting a future that, I believe, is coming true. Authors are finally embracing this themselves as they get back, assert, claim, keep their digital publishing rights. I think that JA Konrath has described this effect with his own work, seeing sales of his back-catalogue increasing as people read his new work.

The online-payment systems, though, as I understand it, are still behind the micropayment times. Paying $0.45 out of $1.00 or $1.99 or $4.99 represent very different profit margins to an author. Whether they settle on a percentage (I'd argue, from my financially ignorant background, that 2-5% is enough margin for any large scale automated payment system to profit handsomely, and percentages rather than flat fees need to figure in to micropayments more heavily than they do now. I think this will be one of the major keys to the puzzle for self-publishers. It may take VISA/MC/AMEX and the debit infrastructure changing to recognize this, but in the end they'll come through and realize there is a fortune to be made here in volume alone - and if they don't come through, Paypal will adjust, or other micro-payment suitable systems will arise.

In the movie world, Netflix has shown us that the one way people will 'rent' movies and be happy is their service. Video stores are shutting down all over the place as the costs leveraged on them for initial purchases and reduced customer counts make their business model no longer viable. I believe there are several music streaming services (pay a monthly fee, listen to whatever you want) which will stream 'radio stations' or individually chosen songs.

I admit to thinking publishers should be looking here for hope...imagine if a major publisher, Penguin for example, or Harlequin, provided a $15/month package that provided you with overdrive-style access to all the works in their catalogue. If you downloaded $15 books, $1/book would be divided up according to whatever agreements were in place. If 5 books were downloaded, $3.00 is divided up. Or perhaps the first $2 of that $15 is for the publisher, but the rest is divided up between authors who's books were downloaded during that time. And, of course, if its 100 books, each author gets a smaller chunk... I could see readers subscribing to their favourite publishers to get the collection of authors they enjoy reading the most. Its something I've only been thinking about recently, so please provide the +/- for me on this one, as I've not thought about it too much so far.

Finally, I've said in the past that the copyright term needs to be greatly reduced. I say it again, but questioning whether it matters or not - it's ignored by the coming generations and seen as a non-entity. For more than 100 years, the creative industry has been fighting piracy (and any industry change that they don't initiate to drive up profits) and failing. The model is broken, and we need to work together to find a viable new model...but it has to be one that is balanced. I'd argue that the one way to save the current system is to CUT copyright terms back to under 10 years - I'd suggest 2-5 at most. This will motivate creatives to keep creating and contributing to society, and promote more creation based on or developed from earlier works...that are still current and in a culture's mindset. During those 2-5 years, the potential sales market is (relatively) infinite via the internet, and distribution costs are near zero...there's a ton of time for profit....