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Originally Posted by gmw
Do any exist? Are there figures showing "block-buster" sales for authors whose works do not have DRM?
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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.
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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.
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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."