Quote:
Originally Posted by VydorScope
It is not as clean as that. If I buy a new car, that takes me out of the market for years. If I buy a book that takes me out of the market for days. Which means I could easily GMWs books and author's books. I would only buy one car.
Every industry has its own dynamics. There is overlap in the basics, but it is only loosely applied. For example I work in higher education, and we constantly work with the competition to help each other out. It is normal for the education industry.
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If the entire argument is that it's about price--that people can buy more books than cars, sure, that's inarguably true. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a fight over that $3.99 or what-have-you. When it comes to legacy-pubbed titles, you better believe that I routinely make decisions as to where I'm spending that $9.99 for a Kindle book. It absolutely is a choice of "
this book" versus "
that book." Therefore, I say that regardless of the size of the purchase, it's still a sale that gets made versus one that doesn't. I don't think that the time argument plays (that you will have "a" car for X years, thus taking you out of the car market). That's built in to the price of the car, just as the value of a one-time short-term enjoyment is built into the value of a book or a DVD. {shrug}.
I do, think, however, that authors don't like to think of their work this way. I believe that they prefer to think of writing as art, not commerce, and thus don't want to think of their sales or their competitor's sales as a zero-sum game. And, if the average book-buyer buys, say, 100 books a year, I suppose that it's not quite "zero-sum." But I don't believe that the competition is one iota less fierce, even if it's not overt; if anything, given the gigantic slush pile, it should be even fiercer, as there are more choices to which the potential buyer may be attracted. I feel that thinking about it in any other way is just illusory. A nice illusion, sure; but illusory. Otherwise, everyone would be posting their books for free on SW, Scribd, here on the MR library, and their blogs, and not putting them up for SALE. Once you put a book up for sale, it's not art--it's commerce; you're an entrepreneur, and you're selling a product. A publisher, not a "writer" any longer. My experience is that the successful authors that come through our place either a) learned this during their time, and then adopted that mindset, or, b) had that mindset in the first place, which is partly why they are successful. I don't know which came first--chicken, egg--but I do know it's pretty damned consistent.
That's my $.02.