Actually, the price of zero is an illusion. When you price it zero, you are not really asking zero return. You are merely shifting the necessary price to elsewhere.

And if you can price it above zero and above the costs, that’s the most efficient way as you don’t need to create another product or service. It also means that there can be more content creators, as there are more creators who have only one skill rather than two or more (to create an extra product or service.

I have posts about this free issue.
http://www.slowblogger.com/search/label/free

For a non-individual author example think of the payment issue surrounding the Battlestar Galactica webisodes that were posted on Scifi.com. Part of the content provider’s position was that the webisodes were only promo and free content for the consumer so the content provider didn’t need to provide a revenue stream to the writers.

Still mulling, but now my mind is heading down another tangent.

AQ

I think if I were published with Tor or Avon or some other huge publisher, I’d be less likely to give them promotional material for free; it’d feel like giving a Toys-for-Tots sort of donation to Bill Gates’s kids. [wry smile] With the small presses, though, it’s understood going in that the writer needs to participate more fully in promotion for their fiction than they would with a NY press. Sure, I could’ve posted those stories on my own web site right off, but my publisher’s site gets more hits than I do, by a few orders of magnitude, so there’s a direct benefit to me in having them there rather than only posting them myself. Of course, doing both is best. :)

I do plan to post some free stories on my own eventually, as many writers with web sites do. (And Scalzi’s tip jar idea is definitely worth thinking about.) But if I can post them somewhere else too, so even more people can read them and become familiar with my work, then that’s a bonus.

Which isn’t to say every writer is going to feel the same, nor should they. And I agree with you that if it became a tacit requirement, or any kind of requirement, that’d be unacceptable. I can’t imagine every publisher being that dumb, though, and any publisher who did would, I think (I hope!) quickly find their writers abandoning them for more reasonable companies.

Angie

the _strong_ bond that forms between readers and our favorite authors. if your fans would let you starve, you're no good.

Bowerbird, I can’t agree with this. There are too many variables in such a scenario which have nothing to do with whether or not an author or their work is ‘good.’ I’d be willing to argue the point but I fear that it would drift too far from Jane’s post.

Angie, appreciate the comments. My mind is still mulling the issue and the long-term implications of content creators giving content providers content for free even in the scenario you outlined. I have no problem whatsoever with content creators or content providers giving consumers free content. It’s the creator to provider exchange that I’m unsure of. I really need more data so I hope more authors will step forward with info because I’m worried that voluntary becomes a tacit requirement and then a de facto expected exchange. Again I’m still mulling.

Jane, my bad. I was using a browser that I’d forgotten doesn’t play nice with your widgets. My bad. And user error on the linking.

Commenting on Scalzi’s POV, I have some vague plans for an anthology of my SF/Fantasy/Paranormal m/m fiction some day, and if this ever comes about I’ll certainly include these promotional stories in it. I’d love to make money on them eventually. I wrote them for publicity, though, and I consider that to be valuable too. As Cory Doctorow says, a writer’s number one problem isn’t piracy — it’s obscurity. At this point in my career I’m pretty darned obscure, and if giving away a few free shorts can help fix that, I’m all for it.

I think there’d be a problem if a publisher were trying to force or pressure writers into participating in a fiction give-away for which they’re not being compensated. If there were a contract clause about participating in the next free stuff promotion, or if there were veiled hints that one’s future publication might depend upon one’s being a team player, or anything similar — I’d have a major problem with that and wouldn’t touch such a publisher with a stick. So long as everyone knows what they’re getting into, though, and there are no stated or implied penalties for declining to participate (both of which are true for my publisher) then I don’t see it as a problem.

Angie

Does free for the reader in this case mean unpaid for the author? (I’m interested in actual payment here rather than soft/indirect benefits for data purposes rather than argument’s sake. Not real numbers. Just an indication of the exchange between content creator and content provider.)

For an insightful article on that aspect of the argument, read John Scalzi’s post.

Whatever post

http://tinyurl.com/dy3245

or

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/08/25/on-writing-for-free/

Any authors who have created free stories that have been made available via a publisher site want to comment on their experience.

Sorry the link kept getting stripped so I manually added it. Jane, not sure I like these newest widgets but it might just be me so I’ll see if I need to upgrade my browser.

Speaking of e-books & the Kindle. Check out last night’s interview on the Daily Show with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. About 14:21 minutes in – 2nd commercial break. I love the ‘read with one hand’ comment. Classic. And is it just me or did Bezos have a geeky laugh that was quite infectious?

Hulu Daily Show Link

Pirating and plagiarism didn’t start because digital formats made it easy. Thieves have been stealing original content since original content came into being. Modern authors actually have an advantage in that stealing is much easier to detect in digital format.

Any author or publisher participating in Read an E-Book Week as a partner is eligible to be included in the catalogue.

Personally I can’t stomach the very well executed alien Alec Baldwin Hulu commercial any more, after their content providers (hint – NBC and Fox) pressured them to sever ties with Boxee (a wonderful media center application). The Boxee developers have made the point that commercials and branding can remain intact within the Boxee environment (an application – still in Alpha – where users sent requests for 100,000 streams to Hulu the week before it was pulled). It doesn’t matter. The content providers still don’t get it. This is, of course, the same NBC that removed themselves from iTunes for a year with similar concerns about their control over content. Further rumors suggest that the big cable companies are pushing for all content airing on cable channels to be available on the internet only to their own subscribers.

In other news, the AP is considering charging for all its news stories.

they shell out money for their churches, and
for their little league infrastructure, and they
hold bakesales for their libraries and the p.t.a.

they support things that are meaningful to ‘em.

so they _will_ support authors. most definitely.

sometimes i swear people must have forgotten
(or never experienced?) the _strong_ bond that
forms between readers and our favorite authors.
if your fans would let you starve, you’re no good.
(sorry to be blunt. but think about it, will you?)

it’s just silly to think that an appreciative reader
of a book won’t toss a couple bucks to the writer
who made that book available to them as a gift…
i gave a tip that big to my _waitress_ last night.

and speaking of libraries, they’ve offered books
to patrons at no cost for borrowing them for
decades now, and they haven’t hurt authors…

so this whole post is rather simplistic, i think.

but if you want to charge money for a book
in this day and age, you have to realize that
competition is now fierce, as mike shatzkin
notes perceptibly in comment number 11…

the whole of literary history, not to mention
the work of a whole lot of newcomers, will
soon be available at the click of a mouse…

if you think you can get us to buy your book
– sight unseen — in spite of that competition,
more power to you, friend, more power to you…

-bowerbird

On the other, the actual problem is that the “protection” has never protected anyone. If your e-book goes out DRMed to within an inch of its life, that’s just an interesting challenge and maybe an hour’s work to a pirate who wants to put it up on their torrent site or something similar. Same with music, movies, computer games — anything. And if they can crack it to torrent, they can crack it just as easily to plagiarize. DRM inconveniences, rips off and annoys the honest customers, while not even slowing down the actual pirates. (Or plagiarizers.)

I’d heard of copy/paste plagiarism, with a global search/replace to change names, happening involving fanfic, on a number of occasions. I guess the fact that I hadn’t heard of it happening before commercial-to-commercial was no reason to be surprised that it had. And actually, now that I think of it, it has happened fanfic-to-commercial — a Linden Bay romance was accused of being plagiarized from a fanfic. The book was withdrawn from sale, but the fanfic writer didn’t have the $$$$ it would’ve taken to pursue a case against the plagiarizer, especially since she’d have gotten little or nothing in damages, since her story had been made available for free and therefore there were no lost revenues, so she dropped the matter, satisfied with the book being taken down. (I even blogged about this back when, so I should’ve thought of it earlier.)

The thing is, there’s really no way to prevent this. Pirates who want to torrent your print books will tear them apart and put them through a scanner one page at a time. I’ve heard of pirates who’ll even take the time after that to go through the file, doing a line-by-line comparison with the book itself to make corrections for any scanning glitches. And these are people who aren’t making any money at it. Someone who thinks they can get away with changing the names in your book and selling it to some other publisher have that much more incentive to get around DRM — any DRM — and they’ll find a way.

The only solution I can think of right now is to pick out some key phrases from all your (our) books and set up Google alerts for them. It won’t be perfect, but then nothing is. It’s just a matter of doing our best without slaughtering the baby before tossing it out with the bathwater. :/

Angie

That said, my other publisher has one book that has been remaindered, but they still don’t consider it out of print. They are doing nothing with any of the rights and although they have verbally agreed to release the rights to me, they have not. My agent has been going after them for a year. Technically, we’re still inside the contractural date, but since they weren’t exploiting the rights, I was trying to get them back early. So far, no luck. But we keep trying.

As for the copy/paste plagiarism, I just got an email from an author who saw my comment, Googled a line from her work and found a plagiarized version online! See? It happens all the time. In her case, it was on a foreign site, so there’s nothing she can likely do. Mine was on a soap opera fan fiction site, which did take it down, though it popped up somewhere else and I had to go after them again.

In a good friend’s case, her story was plagiarized and resold to an epublisher. I believe a reader alerted her after reading an excerpt. The epublisher took the story down. My friend filed Code of Ethics violation against the other author and won, so she (the plagiarist) was kicked out of RWA (or resigned…I really don’t know the details.) But if that reader had not noticed it, that author would have financially benefited from free content on the web. I don’t blame the epublisher…they had no way of knowing and they responded fairly quickly.

The problem is…free content without any protection will make plagiarism easier and it will make it very difficult for authors to keep track of it. It’s not like this can happen with music…you can tell one artist from another. Someone can’t steal your song and resell it somewhere else. Well, I guess they could, but it would be easier to get caught, I think.

Anyway, as I said before, I have no solutions…just concerns.

I would love it if my publisher would put out of print books (to which I do not have the rights) up for free.

I have to ask, why don’t you have the rights to your out of print books? :/ I thought it was standard contract verbage that when a publisher takes a book OOP, the rights revert to the author. Is it standard Harlequin policy that they keep your rights forever…? [blinkblink] Or is there some other reversion trigger?

About the copy/paste plagiarism, I’d never heard of theft that blatant happening before on the commercial side. O_O That’s definitely disturbing, to say nothing of fairly stupid in this Google age. I hope you all stomp hard on the idiots who try to pull that on you. :(

Angie