Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
Anybody selling their books for $.99 does so because they CANT attract an audience willing to pay more. Publishers who can only sell books dirt cheap...can not invest in developing talent. They can’t market on behalf of the author. They can’t give up front payments to let a good number of authors write for a living knowing that only a few of those investments become best sellers.
If you want art to exist, support it financially
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Nope. My attitude is, for self-pubs, that they can damn well start out peddling their wares at a bargain price. If I stumble across them, or find them on Kindle Prime, (so that I get them for freebs), then I will be willing to take a shot and waste a bit of money and time on them. Once they've got a track record and 3, 4, 5+ books up there, go right ahead and raise the price. I've discovered any number of very readable authors this way and I don't mind now paying more to continue reading their series.
This is absolutely no different than the old minor league to major league route. Authors were pubbed by ROC or Bantam or Ace or any number of the "lower-end" genre fiction imprints for BPHs and their books were priced fairly cheaply at airports, drugstores and the like. If they caught on, they'd move up the latter to the "better" imprints and then, maybe, woo-woo, to hardcover. (In fact, that's Laurell K. Hamilton's arc, love her, hate her, or whatever. I started out loving her work, but..oh, well. I'm sure she's crying about my dislike all the way to the bank.)
I have an author like that now, one of my clients, had a bit of a cycle like that. He was with Brown, a midlister, for two decades. He self-pubbed his 1990's detective series with us (eBooks only) when it reverted. They still had his newer series--in paperback. He pubbed a new-new series with us, ebook only. They saw it selling and bought it from him, took the existing books off sale, and re-pubbed them under their own imprint. Longish story short, now his latest in that newest series isn't only in hardcover--it's front table at B&N when it's released. Obviously, all those books are quite
wildly differently priced, over the years. But it's SSDD.
I've got some writers/self-pubs that I discovered for free, or for $1.99 and
now I'm paying $7.99 for their new eBooks. I don't mind that, and they make a
lot more now than they did. It is ever thus, really, in publishing. Start out at the bottom and work their way up. What's new about that?
All this disdain for a $0.99 or $1.99 book; the person who wrote it still worked hard. It might be excellent; without trying them, how can we know?
All this "support the arts" stuff. Let me be really clear about it, from my viewpoint--it's a business. We've all had this crap fed to us, that somehow, the "arts" are superior, noble, that these things--paintings, sculpture, poetry, songs, etc.--are created for the glory of the form, for the "art." I blame the Church for this idea that somehow, work done for money or to support the artist is "filthy lucre" or some lower form of the craft, like people disrespecting artists that work for ad agencies or magazines. What a load of malarky.
I think that the early church had this
brilliant plan--we'll convince the masons and painters and sculptors and so forth to donate all their work, tell them it's for the "glory of God" and that they'll get their reward in heaven. (Thus, meaning, we pay a crapload less for the work. What a deal!) That led, of course, to "regular" people thinking that artists were superior more noble, because they were going to receive preferential treatment at the pearly gates, in recognition of their donations of "art" to the church.
It's morphed and ben retained down through the ages, so that now, we have this mindset that starving artists in coldwater flats and garrets are "nobler" than those working 9-5 for a paying gig. Why is that? Because they're starving for their art? What's noble about starving? What hooey. The work is the work and it either stands or falls on its own. What the author or sculptor or painter went through to create it is irrelevant to me. I like the book--or I don't. What matter to me if the author has a full-time job, making $250K/year or only $250/year?
Telling me to "support it?" Nonsense. I'll support it by paying for the art. That's how it works; whether some millionaire buys a painting in a gallery or it's just me, clicking on a book. There's this idea that somehow, art and artists are superior to the rest of us poor working slobs and that they deserve support that the rest of us don't, so that they can "create." Yah, well, look at the KDP--millions, millions of self-pubbed authors. Most of them have full-time jobs, families that they care for, and so on. Somehow, they've all managed to write books and publish them. Who supported them? PBS? The NEA? No--they supported
themselves, earning a living and writing at night, in the mornings, on their lunch hours.
Same with all these garage bands. All these visual artists, now pubbed on Etsy, on places ranging from Adobe Stock to Fotolia to Pixabay. All these millions of people, trying to be artists, all supporting themselves at regular, boring old workaday jobs--all striving for artistic recognition and remuneration for their efforts. It's not a lot different than it was before, except now,
EVERYBODY can try. Everybody can play. Not just "special" artist that find angels or backers or whatever.
In many ways, it's a far more democratic and merit-based system. The internet, ironically, IS "support for the arts." :-)
Hitch