Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Baen started with the premise, "let's believe our customers are decent people, and smart, and will therefore want to pay money to support the people who bring them what they want to read."
Instead of "let's believe our customers are borderline-criminals, waiting for the chance to screw us over."
The "customers are cool" approach works. It works *tremendously* well for Baen, which is a big player in a niche market; it's working tolerably well for smaller companies like Loose Id and Samhain Press, who are in a niche that doesn't get discussed much in public.
The "customers are bandits from whom we must seize our rightful pay" approach is not working so well. The customers don't care if the publishers are flailing under economic shifts; they don't tell their friends to buy more of that publisher's books; they don't forgive mistakes; they don't buy a copy of something they already had as a freebie.
I'm not saying, "all the major publishers should adopt Baen's methods." A lot of Baen's methods work precisely because they're small and niche-focused. But all the major publishers should look at Baen's methods, and figure out how many of them they could steal or adapt, because those methods *work*, and what Macmillan and Random House are doing... isn't working so well. The "free promo ebook--laden with DRM and don't you dare share it with anyone else" gets downloads, but not referrals.
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What I am saying is that the big six ought to think of their business as a conglomerate of niches, and build little, tight Baen-like sub publishers for most of their lines. The result would be a much smaller, efficient and profitable organization. Instead we get the "Hollywood Mega-hit" mindset, which is really profitable (over the long term) even in Hollywood....