Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
I honestly don't think pirates give a damn WHAT publishers do to promote ebooks. They want the price of ebooks to be zero and will steal from the author if it is above zero. THE END.
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That takes us back to the initial situation:
Those people
are not his customers. They never will be his customers. You just said it yourself:
They want the price of ebooks to be zero. If the price is non-zero, they won't pay it.
So why is he getting all worked up about people
who would not give him money if hell froze over and the demons broke out their ice skates? They're not his customers. He's not going to get their money. Their money is not on the table, it's not even out of their wallets, and it won't be. If they couldn't get his ebooks for free, they'd watch TV or something. The circumstances under which he would get their money do not exist. Those people are not part of the equation.
The important people are the ones who
are his customers, and the ones who
might become his customers. Those are the people he should be catering to, connecting with, and working with -- not the wankers who won't give him money under any circumstances.
There are people who pirate the book because it's free. If they were unable to do this, would they give him money?
NO. You said it yourself:
they want the price of ebooks to be zero. If it was impossible for them to pirate the book, they still wouldn't give him any money. So he can keep stressing about those people, and decide to stop writing in order to stick it to those people, and the people in question ... won't care. They probably even won't know.
But who will know? The people who
do pay for his books. The ones who give him money. Those are the people his actions are hurting -- not the ones who will never give him money. They're the people who think his writing is worth at least as much as a cup of coffee. They're the ones he needs to be selling his book to.
I'll say it again: J.K. Rowling may be losing substantial amounts of money to piracy. But Steve Jordan's problem is
not piracy -- his problem is not being J.K. Rowling. If everyone who downloaded illicit copies of ebooks stopped tomorrow, he
still wouldn't be making a living off his books. This is not because of piracy. This is because of being an author. For every J.K. Rowling, there are thousands, tens of thousands, of pbook writers working 9-5 jobs to pay the bills. And for every one of those, there are a thousand or more ebook writers with hopes and dreams but no sales. This is not because the evil pirates are stealing all their sales. It's because the sales
are not there to begin with.
There are, as of this moment, 932,053 ebooks on Amazon. (I'm picking on the Kindle here because it's easy to get numbers for) According to another thread here, 80% of US families did not read a book last year. Quickfacts tells me there 105,480,101 households in 2009. That gives us 2,109,602 households with where someone read a book. I can't find a quick number for ebook reader penetration, so I'll guess high and say that 10% of those households read their book(s) on an ebook reader, and based on the MobileRead device forums readership at the time of writing this, 36% of those ebook readers were Kindles (or Kindle-for-whatever). That's 75,946 households in which someone bought one or more ebooks from Amazon. So for one read per book, that's about a dozen books per household -- one per month. But those books are not evenly distributed. All 932k books don't have equal chances of being read. A lot more of them are reading
Water for Elephants than are reading ... well, anything any of us are ever likely to write. 2679 people have
reviewed that book ... your average indie ebook author is doing well if he gets 2679 sales, and that's including everyone he knows, even the people at the health club he badgered into reading it. For every sale > 1 that a bestseller gets, some other book is not being read at all that year.
And that's the problem.
It's not that people are pirating Steve's book and reading that "free" copy -- it's that
they're not reading any copy, at any price. Every last pirate could take up knitting instead of reading tomorrow and he
still wouldn't be making money off his books, because
the market is not there, and especially the market for
him is not there. The market for ebooks is still small, and the market for ebooks from people who are not well-known is downright microscopic. And if you're trying to sell ebooks, you're not just competing with today's big names, you're competing with Sir Walter Scott and Mark Twain, and they're damned tough competition.
His problem is not that people are reading his book and not paying him to do so; his problem is that
people are not reading his book. Once he addresses
that problem, he can worry about whether he's losing sales to the other one.
But, again, you said it in your own post:
They want the price of ebooks to be zero. If they couldn't get it at a price of zero, they wouldn't get it at all. So if you're not going to get their money no matter what you do, why bother with them at all -- focus on the people whose money you
are going to get, and on getting that money. There are ways to do that. Flouncing off like Anne Rice is not any of them.