[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

The 'free' and 'indie published' authors are not a real concern. They don't sell anywhere near enough copies to matter, for the most part. Even Boyd Morrison could sell 10x at least what he's selling in ebooks if he could actually get in print.

They don't have to sell a single copy to divert attention away from your writing. You could be the greatest writer on earth but a FREE novel is always going to be a better value proposition to a reader than a paid-for novel. The more people publish freely, maybe using a donation model, the less and less you as the in-print/traditional writer has to offer the market. And now we have services like ScribD and others popping up that are offering writers 80% revenues on their electronic works, why do you think that the traditional publishing route can even survive the next five to ten years, let alone sustain the old and grossly unfair pricing models?

Your math makes no sense here. If you got a $5K advance, you'd start earning more after 8,333 copies. And I deliberately presented a scenario without an advance to show what you could actually earn. Obviously if you can't sell enough copies to earn out your advance, then you're still ahead $5K. So yes, if you can only sell 2 books a year and you're not even good enough to sell 8,000 copies each, you'll only make $10K.

My Maths is terrible, I'll grant you that. But from your Maths we see that you'd have to sell those 2 books, which if your first book doesn't earn out you're highly unlikely to do. If your first book doesn't make its advance back then you're looking at losing your agent and your name being 'mud' in the industry. You won't get a deal for a 2nd book (unless you sell a multi-book deal in the first place) if your first book is a stinker. And if, as I assume, you're aiming for the Sci-Fi market (a publishing ghetto if there ever was one) then all this is compounded threefold by the amount of competition in that field vying for the very few, and getting fewer, avenues of publication.

Yes, there are alternatives. They won't make as much as traditional publishing, currently. That's why people still traditionally publish.

NOW, still publish 'now' should be the added word at the end there. Because the industry is changing so rapidly that what you think is right NOW will mean nothing in 6 months time. The digerati are changing the face of publishing, they're laughing at the old ways (check out recent #agentfail on Twitter), they're constantly inventing new ways to interact with the reading audience and expanding that relationship that will within a couple of years time make the publishing industry look stale and outmoded for the most part.

Why are you quoting URLs I've read, which support my position, not yours? His first novel -- his FIRST novel -- sold only 10K copies. As his craft improved, a later novel sold 30K. He also was able to selling many more copies of his FIRST novel after he started offering the ebook FOR FREE, and after the later novel, 1632, became popular and people went back to buy his previous work.

Again, as I said, it's hard to make much money off your first couple of novels. It improves from there, unless your stuff is simply not worth publishing, in which case you shoudl confine yourself to your artistic-soul-pleasing happy free Internet writing.

Why quote him, well the quotation I referenced was the main part of his argument. Writers don't make money for the most part, and that's going to be doubly so in the brave new world of digital reading. And sure, Eric Flint sold and continues to sell lots of print books, but he started 10 years ago in an industry that was still bouyant, where Amazon was only just getting a foothold and the iPhone didn't exist. He's built a relationship with his audience from print into digital. Do you think any 'new' writer will have that same kind of advantage, coming into this industry as it takes its last faltering breaths? (Okay so it's not dying overnight, but it's not getting nay healthier. You get published now and it's going to get harder and harder to sustain your writing over the coming years as the transition occurs).

And here we get to 'worth'. And worth as it is measured by the publishing industry. Worth = sale-ability. Worth = price tag. If publishing company X can shift Y amount of Book A at a cost of....etc, etc.. The profit game in a nutshell. Doesn't matter if the book is good or not, its whether it can make a profit. Whereas the web/internet works differently. A web hit might not make any profit at all for the writer, but it might make that writer well-known. It will elevate that writer in the community and then monetary opportunities might follow. And what has this new writer lost? A few quid, the opportunity to slave along in a dying industry? And he's gained all that loverly soul-satisfying stuff that you can't put a price tag on. What's the old saying:

There's no money in poetry, but then again there's no poetry in money.

Because with a little elbow grease, my monetary bonus becomes much larger if I actually get my work published the traditional way rather than -- whatever it is you're proposing (it's not exactly clear). Yes, economics are changing, but it hasn't changed yet. Even if one accepts your premise that even good writers can't make a living writing, that doesn't at all justify the notion that the economics of the industry should change such that nobody can make a living writing.

And here we come to the crux of the whole argument. Elbow grease means nought if the traditional way is dying out. What you get now, whatever paltry sum that might be in the traditional publishing world (Unless you're a no-talent celebrity, the publishing world loves those) it won't be what you get a year from now, five years from now when the whole game has changed. When your publishing contract means absolutely zero because the publishing companies are about as meaningful to a web audience as the major record labels and the TV networks. Just think about how social media is changing everything, how much weight an artist has for going against the traditional routes and releasing stuff under CC and other licenses. You really think there's going to be much of a place for the static, hierarchical, slow-moving, bottom-liners in this world?

I mean, Baen has the right idea up to now (although I wince at the quasi-fascistic, war-loving titles it seems to produce, not really my cup of tea), but that can't last forever. Once print-publishing dies out (and I give it 10 years at most) then what are you left with? How do you make money in a world where your product is competing constantly with free?

Things are changing, publishing has to change and it has to change rapidly to keep up with what is happening. The writer does too. If they don't, then they'll become as quaint and useless as the paper that their words used to be printed on in the unenlightened past.

EDIT: and let me just add, I approach writing from a zero-money approach. I fully expect to make ZERO from my writing now and in the future. I have no cash incentive at all. I realized some time ago that worrying about payment was reducing me to a business-person, someone who knew how to use Excel (evil, nasty, soul-sucking program) and who was slanting their work toward the fabled 'markets'. My payment now has to be the writing itself. The process of writing has to give me everything I need to start off with. Everything else is secondary to that initial goal of being happy and enjoying the writing. If I gain readers, good If somewhere along the line I get some money out of all this, fine. But I won't ruin my enjoyment of writing worrying about either of those potentialities.