These essays by Eric Flint are from 2002 but still have bearing.
Prime Palaver # 6 Eric Flint April 15, 2002
Quote:
Jim Baen and I set up the Free Library about a year and half ago. Leaving aside the various political and philosophical issues, which I've addressed elsewhere, the premise behind the Library had a practical component as well. In brief, that in relative terms an author will gain, not lose, by having titles in the Library.
What I mean by "relative" is simply this: overall, an author is far more likely to increase sales than to lose them. Or, to put it more accurately, exposure in the Library will generate more sales than it will lose.
As a practical proposition, the theory behind the Free Library is that, certainly in the long run, it benefits an author to have a certain number of free or cheap titles of theirs readily available to the public. By far the main enemy any author faces, except a handful of ones who are famous to the public at large, is simply obscurity. Even well-known SF authors are only read by a small percentage of the potential SF audience. Most readers, even ones who have heard of the author, simply pass them up.
Why? In most cases, simply because they don't really know anything about the writer and aren't willing to spend $7 to $28 just to experiment. So, they keep buying those authors they are familiar with.
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Prime Palaver # 7 Eric Flint April 26, 2002
Quote:
Every professional in the industry knows perfectly well that, with a small number of exceptions, 80% of the sales of a book are going to happen in the first three months after the book appears on the shelves. And once a book is more than two or three years old, as a rule, it will sell very few copies. By "very few," I'm talking about a few hundred copies a year. That's true even for paper editions today, much less electronic editions -- which today sell maybe 5 or 10 copies a year of that same book.
Granted, some books do better than that. On the other hand, lots of books do worse than that. In fact, it is not at all uncommon to see books going out of print within a year or two after they come out.
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This one from Janis Ian well just read it.
Prime Palaver # 11 Janis Ian September 16, 2002
Quote:
When I research an article, I normally send 30 or so emails to friends and acquaintances asking for opinions and anecdotes. I usually receive 10-20 in reply. But not so on this subject!
I sent 36 emails requesting opinions and facts on free music downloading from the Net. I stated that I planned to adopt the viewpoint of devil's advocate: free Internet downloads are good for the music industry and its artists.
I've received, to date, over 300 replies, every single one from someone legitimately "in the music business."
What's more interesting than the emails are the phone calls. I don't know anyone at NARAS (home of the Grammy Awards), and I know Hilary Rosen (head of the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA) only vaguely. Yet within 24 hours of sending my original email, I'd received two messages from Rosen and four from NARAS requesting that I call to "discuss the article."
Huh. Didn't know I was that widely read.
Ms. Rosen, to be fair, stressed that she was only interested in presenting RIAA's side of the issue, and was kind enough to send me a fair amount of statistics and documentation, including a number of focus group studies RIAA had run on the matter.
However, the problem with focus groups is the same problem anthropologists have when studying peoples in the field – the moment the anthropologist's presence is known, everything changes. Hundreds of scientific studies have shown that any experimental group wants to please the examiner. For focus groups, this is particularly true. Coffee and donuts are the least of the pay-offs.
The NARAS people were a bit more pushy. They told me downloads were "destroying sales", "ruining the music industry", and "costing you money".
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bernie