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Originally Posted by stonetools
For even more decades novels were serialized in magazines that had ads in them.Most great SF novels published before 1950 were serialized in magazines. Again , people tend to have this rosy-colored view of the past that doesn't stand up to historical analysis.
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True. And serializations are a means of promotion: a way of getting new readers to read your books. A time honored marketing tradition, like giving them away free.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
Novels aren't the only type of ebook there can be, either. There are also short story or essay collections.
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Reading a comic, magazine, even a collection of short stories or essays is a very different experience than reading a novel. The former have hard breaks between elements of content, when one ends and another begins. Advertising there is not as jarring as it would be even with ads between novel chapters.
What it comes down to, though, is the justification. Why?
Going back to the golden age of magazines... what happened to them? I think Asimovs (a johnny-come-lately) and Analog are the only SF survivors. The cost of physically printing these magazines, and shipping &tc was getting too high.
Also, their ads were one way: they put their ads before the reader's eyeballs, not combined with gifting reader privacy to corporate advertisers as has been suggested.
Those ads were an important stream of revenue. One thing that no one screaming about piracy ever mentions is real costs. After you've done ebook setup, making copies costs the publisher about the same as it costs to copy an email. The resulting digital copies cost how much? Almost from the moment that music CDs appeared on the market, the word was out that the real cost was only a few cents each, yet prices were artificially raised to $20 or more.
When the audience believes it is being ripped off, it ceases to owe any loyalty.
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Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
Getting the ads in the first place is going to take a few weeks of networking because I'm no Janet Evanovich. These people aren't going to come to me. I'll have to go looking. That's a few more weeks where instead of working prose, I'm working ads...
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Exactly. If I wanted to sell advertising, I wouldn't be writing novels.
I will use name brands where appropriate because humans do. (Verisimilitude.) But I would never want to even consider product placement, because then I would have to serve the needs of the corporation rather than the needs of the story.
Again, far too high a price to pay.
Knocking a couple of bucks off an overpriced ebook does not even approach a justification level for advertising. If both reader and content were free perhaps then. Not before. [And not for me.]