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gmw · 10-08-2021, 03:26 AM

I wasn't going to get this personal, but Hitch and Quoth, you pushed me into it by being so polite about book sales.

Simply put: most titles don't sell enough to justify paying a monthly fee. Yes, I'm talking about me. I'm not going to go into reasons, reasons don't really matter to this conversation, what matters is that my one trilogy - now 6/7 years old - doesn't sell enough to justify ANY sort of subscription fee for hosting, and certainly my few free short stories are not going to pay for it.

I am not surprised, but I would care a lot more if I was having to pay a monthly subscription fee to keep them listed. In that case they'd quickly go the same way as all those "out of print" books out there. Instead, they happily sit on Amazon servers, and Ingram print-on-demand servers, and many other places, waiting to be found, or for me to do something about making them more visible (and again the details are not relevant).

And this is not some unusual story. Indeed, I would hazard that this is among the most common of stories. Books do not just keep selling forever, especially books that didn't get particularly famous to start with. No they fade into the backlist (for those authors that keep publishing), or into obscurity (for those that don't - this wasn't going to be me, but at the moment it appears to be the case).

What keeps these books available for rare collectors or new readers is piggy-backing onto services that are willing to host these old titles for the kudos of be being able to say they have X million titles available. Never mind that X-minus-a-select-few sell bugger-all, if any, it is still a service they can offer with minimal cost to themselves as long as that ever changing select-few keep selling.

There's an old saying that the more things change the more they stay the same, well this is one of those things. Big sellers have always paid the way for the rest of the crop, right back through traditional publishing. For all that self-publishing appears to be a revolution, it is still a fact that the big sellers are paying the way - it's just that the cost of holding all those millions of titles is now close to negligible for someone like Amazon who will likely pay more to store their transaction data than all those old titles combined.

10-08-2021, 03:26 AM	#10
gmw cacoethes scribendi Posts: 5,818 Karma: 137770742 Join Date: Nov 2010 Location: Australia Device: Kobo Aura One & H2Ov2, Sony PRS-650	I wasn't going to get this personal, but Hitch and Quoth, you pushed me into it by being so polite about book sales. Simply put: most titles don't sell enough to justify paying a monthly fee. Yes, I'm talking about me. I'm not going to go into reasons, reasons don't really matter to this conversation, what matters is that my one trilogy - now 6/7 years old - doesn't sell enough to justify ANY sort of subscription fee for hosting, and certainly my few free short stories are not going to pay for it. I am not surprised, but I would care a lot more if I was having to pay a monthly subscription fee to keep them listed. In that case they'd quickly go the same way as all those "out of print" books out there. Instead, they happily sit on Amazon servers, and Ingram print-on-demand servers, and many other places, waiting to be found, or for me to do something about making them more visible (and again the details are not relevant). And this is not some unusual story. Indeed, I would hazard that this is among the most common of stories. Books do not just keep selling forever, especially books that didn't get particularly famous to start with. No they fade into the backlist (for those authors that keep publishing), or into obscurity (for those that don't - this wasn't going to be me, but at the moment it appears to be the case). What keeps these books available for rare collectors or new readers is piggy-backing onto services that are willing to host these old titles for the kudos of be being able to say they have X million titles available. Never mind that X-minus-a-select-few sell bugger-all, if any, it is still a service they can offer with minimal cost to themselves as long as that ever changing select-few keep selling. There's an old saying that the more things change the more they stay the same, well this is one of those things. Big sellers have always paid the way for the rest of the crop, right back through traditional publishing. For all that self-publishing appears to be a revolution, it is still a fact that the big sellers are paying the way - it's just that the cost of holding all those millions of titles is now close to negligible for someone like Amazon who will likely pay more to store their transaction data than all those old titles combined.