'Selling' Your Book for Free: The Truth.
Having read three blogs in the last two weeks (ish) discussing fiction writers being poorly paid I felt I should re-blog and expand on a notion that I mentioned in one of the comments sections, inspired by all three.
The three blogs are Chris Hill's, Jay Dee Archer’s and Pat Garratt’s. The first is an article about how writers don’t get paid enough, also linking to a second and older article decrying those who put out their work for free.
The second is a —understandable— reaction to an outrageous suggestion by a reader that an author should feel obliged to ‘sell’ her novels for free (all the time) because they are so good.
The third mentions why we do it for love, because if you are intent on being trad published you will write several novels that will be shelved until you hit upon one that is commercially viable and a company wants to buy it from you.
Mostly, I want to address the argument that self-published writers should not sell their work for free. The general opinion from those on this side of the fence is that by doing so it spoils the pot for the rest of the profession by cheapening it – i.e. lowering the market’s expectation of what a customer should pay for a book – and thus forcing everyone else to accept less money or also offer theirs for free.
Under this belief, and since Hachette won the dispute with Amazon to choose their own list prices, the publishing industry has tried to address the balance by hiking up the price of their ebooks while simultaneously driving sales back towards hard copies.
I would argue that they are just as culpable in this apparent cheapening of the profession because, in their mission to raise ebook prices, they actually drove customers towards choosing cheaper books. Let me put it another way.
It’s a bit of a thing over here in France to price stock high and wait until it sells, rather than lower the price to something more reasonable and sell more of said thing. That leads to a lot of stale produce in our local shops, because there seems to be a belief that if they keep it on the shelves long enough it will sell. At the car boot sales we often see the same tired items year after year on offer from the same people just waiting for that ideal customer to come along and say ‘oh! Look! That broken old chair is exactly what I’ve been searching for. I can mend that and sell it as an antique’. This obviously doesn't happen, but rather than lower the price and shift the damn things, they'll hold out for a better price, no matter how long it takes.
Ok, it’s slightly different for books sales — they can stay on the shelves and still shift without necessarily going mouldy — but the point is, with ebooks, how many they sell affects their Amazon ranking, so setting prices high wouldn't help their authors as much as they liked to make out. Also, there’s no limit to how many can sell and no extra cost in producing or distributing them from the initial setup, so keeping the prices high was seen as greedy, not reasonable. Where I live, I can’t access the types of books I like in English at a local shop, so I’m rarely going to buy a physical book – my Kindle is a (book) life saver, and I don’t have to wait or pay for delivery. I’m also unlikely to pay $10 or over €8 for an ebook, no matter the author. So anyone selling an ebook at that price has already lost a customer.
There is also an entirely different way of looking at this ‘do not sell your books for free’ idea. All those published authors who wrote two, five, maybe seven novels before they were accepted by a trad publisher, in essence, they all wrote those novels for free. They stuck them in a drawer because they weren't good enough to make money (apparently). Maybe some of them will get to see the light of day once the author is established and will later sell based on that reputation; it happens.
That 'bottom drawer fiction' is what's being pedaled by a lot of self-publishers on ebooks -- they didn't bother taking ten years + and several novels to learn how to write well before putting it out to the big bad world; many wrote their first novel, gave it a grammar check (maybe) and hit the 'publish' button. They certainly didn’t pore over its commercial viability, analyse current trends nor research their markets (well, maybe a few, let’s be fair). So why should they be paid the same rates as professionals for producing under-par work?
Don’t get me wrong; in principle I absolutely agree that good writers should be paid (well) for their work, and if I ever choose to self-publish any of my novels I'd like to be paid a reasonable price for them. But if I'm an unknown author trying to attract readers I'm not going to completely dismiss the idea of putting one out for free or cheap if I feel the ROI will be worth it.
By expecting ALL writers to set the same rates that are held by professionals in order to keep the professionals on their preferred and higher pay scales is the same as saying any old Joe Blogs can build an extension on a house and expect the same rates as a qualified, experienced builder. It also says Mr Blogs should charge those unearned high rates just so the professional builder can keep his luxury caravan in spit and polish. (They have programs on telly to investigate that kind of behaviour.) Why should readers pay the same amount of money to read the 'practice' novels of the mad cat woman of Truro as they would pay a professional who's been in the business for decades?
Until you’ve earned the right to charge higher rates, as a start-up author you have no choice but to sell for free or cheap. Or would you prefer it that everyone else goes home and doesn’t try in the first place?
The problem is that there is no longer a distinction between professional level and amateur, and there are many people out there who will happily read shite (hey, I’m not judging – I still like Bon Jovi, that’s my guilty pleasure! Not that they are shite – maybe trite – but they certainly are not considered serious ‘rock’. Oh the shame!! Don’t tell anyone, ok?).
There's also the WHOLE CULTURE on the internet of give-aways — music, film, photos, advice — so you can't place the blame solely on Indy authors; everyone is doing it. It's the way things are going. Does anyone remember that we are still in the death throes of 2008 and that many people don’t have the disposable income we once all had? And is that the fault of Indy authors? I think not, matey. Take it that your book money is sitting on the high seas of the Caribbean in the form of some banker’s yacht, because it’s their fuck-up that’s put the whole world in this position in the first place.
This blossoming freebie culture is going to continue to cause friction between those who ‘have’ and want to protect their haves, and those who have not and want a free and sharing society and do what they love, or just plain can’t afford it. It might even be the beginning of the biggest revolution since the outbreak of staunch communism in the twentieth century, or the massive industrial shift which endured from the late eighteenth until the early twentieth centuries.
Just as with any small business, those who have a good product, are market savvy, focused and determined will surely likely succeed, and the ones who don’t probably weren’t operating as an effective business in the first place. Because that is what writers forget: as soon as they attempt to sell their writing they become a small business, no longer just an author.
This is especially true for self-publishers. Business means competition and suddenly you are swimming with sharks. But it’s not the little fish authors need to worry about, it’s the huge behemoth that is the modern leisure industry, which once upon a time was dominated by people reading books, listening to vinyl and watching The Two Ronnies on the 'box' with Mum and Dad. Nowadays, you have to convince them that reading your book is more to their benefit than watching Thrones, or going to Zumba. Or playing Zombie Ketchup on their Xbox. So there’s another reason to lower book prices. It’s not just Indy authors.
Those writers who say they don’t put out their books for free – i.e. ‘I don’t work for free’ — just think about what that actually means. What you are saying is that you are launching your new business with an expectation of being paid for an unknown product, that you won’t incur losses in your formative years of business, even though you have no proven product, no proven reputation.
Let’s put this into perspective.
My husband’s a builder. When we first moved to France we had to start that business from scratch. We didn’t know ANYONE, had no previous record of success or evidence of skills, other than his college certificates and his previous boss’s recommendations (not translated into French, incidentally). Our first two years were spent renovating our own house. When other ex-pats came by, they saw the quality of my husband’s work. It served as his portfolio. People were bugging him to go plaster for them and build stonework even though he’d said he wasn’t starting up yet. But when it came to finding paying customers — even to this day — the amount of time he had to put in to drive and see the job, price it all up, with no guarantee he’d get the work, chalks up to a lot of unpaid hours. But he did it — still does it — because a certain amount of ‘working for free’ is part of the territory of being self-employed.
Start up a restaurant and what do most places do on launch night? Invite as many people as possible, put on a free spread so the potential customer base gets a taster of what they can expect, and hope that they’ll be so impressed they’ll come back to dine properly the following night. Other restaurant owners don’t go around saying ‘that free food/gig/first drink is driving my prices down and ruining the restaurant trade’. The only difference is that in the age of the internet it feels like too many authors crowding an already crammed street.
In order to get work, any self-employed person must build themselves a portfolio and a reputation, and many accept that there is a certain amount of work they must do for free. It’s true of artists, media types and builders, to name but a few. Copywriters create spec ads — that’s an advert they have created for an imaginary product to prove they understand a brand’s message and voice and can sell for that company. It shows ability, but it’s not worth anything monetary-wise. It’s a tool to win projects. Why should book writing be the exception to the rule? In a world where huge chunks of business are performed over the internet and anyone can set themselves up under a pseudonym, it’s a necessary evil in order to win trust and prove you’re not some kind of scammer.
So while in principle I agree that good writers should be well paid – and I do truly believe that! – the system needs a major overhaul to create a clearer line between professional and amateur so that serious writers can be effective business people and hobby writers are still free to take their chances to become the same. We are currently in the ‘big bang’ of the new publishing world, and the dust hasn’t begun to settle yet. New galaxies are being created all the time from the particles of the digital explosion and who knows where it will all lead or when it will become stable enough to viably exist within, much like any social or industrial revolution.
Until then, we have a tier system – the cream get to charge over £5 for their work, mid-listers probably a quid or two less and those starting out are the 99p or free crowd. Many people are beginning to understand how it works, but most readers don’t differentiate. Until those lines become clearer, you can’t expect readers to pay top dollar for portfolio pieces of work — or bottom drawer fiction — created by amateurs just because it doesn’t suit you (and I know you – the good writer — deserve to be paid well for your efforts but I’m afraid, in this instance, the customer comes first, as they should in any business). The lower pricing is their main indicator that the quality of work is likely not up to top standard and they are taking their chances.
As much as trad publishing both fascinates and frustrates me, it is effectively the rubber stamp to avoiding all that. It says that they’ve gone through your portfolios (your rejections) and then found something that, for them, works. The next level. The paid project. The advantage a trad pubbed author has over a self-pubbed one is that they are marketed under the banner of an established company with a reputation behind its name. They don't have the same legwork as a brand new, yet-to-be-established self-publishing author. But they still work for free every time one of them appears at a literary festival or book signing for zero dollar.
So I say to those who argue against selling their work for free (and note, that is what I’m talking about, not working for free in other mediums such as those literary festivals) and wish to shift the burden of blame onto Indy authors for lowering ‘wages’, just think about some of the things I’ve mentioned. Think about the scope of what ALL start-up businesses must do to establish a client base. Think about the culture of the internet on the whole and where that is leading to. Think about every great, successful revolution – from the storming of the Bastille to the tide of the first printing presses. And, if you are one of the ruling elite, mostly think about — when the crunch comes and the peasants no longer beg for the crumbs of your cake — just how you propose to keep your lovely head.
