Quote:
Originally Posted by sergiodongala
So why authors don't just sell the rights for worldwide sells?
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The reason is because today a book generally has six months of life when it can actually rake in cash. You want your book visible, and people talking about your book. The attention span of would be consumers is very short. So it needs a directed pretty focused marketing campaign. Lots of noise at one time. It helps if the author tours the country, gets interviewed on TV and does signings. Each book generally only gets one shot.... when it gets released. You want to wait with doing this until you've got a marketing campaign ready to go.
This is partly a cultural thing, partly a marketing thing. It needs to change and it will change. But what needs to change first is how book consumers inform themselves of which books to read. This will be painfully slow. Consumers are always conservative.
Do you remember how movies used to be released, before Internet came? It could be years between a US premier and a Swedish premier. Then Internet piracy came which effectively forced the major studios to release films simultaneously all over the world. What Internet piracy created was a new way film consumers found out about new films, which then changed the way they formed an opinion of what to see, regardless of if they pirated or not.
This will happen to books as well, I'm sure. Book readers won't sit passively waiting to be informed any longer. They'll go out on the Internet and go looking for things to find, like the person who started this thread did. The rest is just market economy. Publishers will find a new model that will allow them to sell over the Internet to the whole world. It's just a matter of time.