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Old 04-06-2012, 10:40 AM   #375
Elfwreck
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Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw View Post
Do any exist? Are there figures showing "block-buster" sales for authors whose works do not have DRM?
Doctorow, who releases his works under Creative Commons, is doing fine. Bujold's works, sold through Baen, are doing well. Konrath .... (Konrath is perhaps not a "blockbuster" author. But anyone who pulls 6 figures doing self-published midlist ebooks should get attention from publishers; they should be asking themselves "how many more of our books can do this?")

It's hard to get data because the "big 6" publishers won't allow non-DRM'd works except in very special cases (Doctorow can set his own terms), so there are very few non-DRM'd books that have the marketing power of a big publisher behind them to compare with the others. But the few that do have the same kind of promotion and industry attention (Locus won't review self-published books) seem to do fine.

Quote:
How do they stack up against the really big names for those whose works usually have DRM? This is the sort of thing I was referring to as evidence. I don't have it, do you? It seems to me that we are both arguing in the dark here, both us referring only to anecdotal evidence and a "feel" for what the larger picture might be. Without such evidence the circles of this thread, and others, are all that is left to us.
Anecdotal evidence is indeed not hard data... but the anecdotal evidence all points the same direction.

Several small publishers, Baen being the largest, have "experimented" with non-DRM ebooks. None of them have yet come out and said, "this just isn't working; we're going to add DRM from now on."
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