Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
Jerry Pournelle use to write quite a bit about piracy and ebooks. Of course, when he first started writing about piracy, there were few if any ebooks. His piracy was people making paper copies of his books, usually outside the US and Europe. So piracy didn't suddenly spring into existence with digital media.
The other thing that I took from him was his worry about ebooks. He had a pretty good backlist that was re-printed regularly. He use to call his backlist, his retirement fund. A lot of authors, mid-tier and higher felt that way. Fortunately, Jim Baen convinced him to allow his books to be used as part of the Baen ebook experiment, and it seems that Pournelle made good money out of it.
In my experience, the people tend tp blame piracy for their product not selling well, when most of the time, it's either a poor product, poor marketing or a combination of things. A number of mid-tier authors are mid-tier for a reason. Frankly, there are a number of authors whom I tried, read a few books, then lost interest in. It was the same old, same old and they didn't quite have the story telling ability to make it seem fresh.
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This in a nutshell. Blame anything but the real cause.