6 ms·

Crime Writer Makes a Killing With 99 Cent E-Books

72 points by cwan 16y ago

DrStalker 16y ago
I'm most interested in the comments about the effect of lowering the price to 99c. Personally the price point and ease of purchase is key for me; I'll pay up to the cost of a cup of coffee for something if I think it will entertain me for a few minutes. As soon as the price point is over a cup of coffee I need to think for a little bit if I care enough to buy something, and most of the time I don't think it's worth the mental effort of deciding if I want something enough at that point. (As an interesting side note, indie PC games can cost two cups of coffee before I need to think about their purchase. That's just the valuation I fell into without planning.)
- awj 16y ago
  Yeah, in that respect the choice of 99c is interesting. Amazon switches from taking 70% of the price to taking 30% of the price at $2.99. Granted, we're now coming down to "what do you mean by coffee", but that's still less than your average somethingacchino at starbucks.
bkaid 16y ago
The app store effect on pricing will be coming to ebooks. With e-books being way overpriced (sometimes more than the print version), this has to be a good thing for consumers and authors - at least to an extent.
- Semiapies 16y ago
  I hope more ebook publishers (both individuals and companies) look at this. There are too many outlets that think they can sell a file for most of the price of a physical book - usually the same outlets that have been blaming their price hikes on the rising cost of paper for the last 30 years.
  - sethg 16y ago
    The last time I saw this discussion go around the SF blogosphere, people close to the industry said that very little of the cost of a book is actually tied up in the marginal cost of paper and shipping; most of it is overhead associated with running a publishing company that can’t be economized away by switching to e-books. On the other hand, Kristine Kathryn Rusch said that one reason the overhead is so high is that publishers locked themselves into long-term contracts for things like Manhattan editorial offices and printers’ services, so they can’t reduce their overheads until those contracts expire.
    - Semiapies 16y ago
      I'm particularly thinking of niche and hobby presses that don't have Manhattan offices. Some of them have tried to straight-up sell ebooks at paper prices.
muhfuhkuh 16y ago
It's the return of the penny dreadful. Kids (and the young at heart) dreaming of adventure and hack-n-slash violence read these cheap little pulp paperbacks about horseback robbers and high seas pirate swashbucklers. Two significant changes, now: It's had to adjust for inflation, but I think the convenience of getting it beamed to your device instantaneously makes up for it. The second is that the overwhelming majority of the readership is women (in the comments of the original interview, Locke suggests that his readership is up to 80% women who fantasize, as they read his exploits, about "changing" the protagonist for the better). Welcome to the indie economy revolution. First they came for the apps (the vast majority of the top 100 paid in the App Store and Marketplace are from indie developers), 1-5 team houses that need only split their massive spoils a few ways; and the numbers are massive if memory serves; something like $10000 a day for a top 10 game, and that's _after_ Apple's vig. And, those who choose free with ads or freemium on Android, can see numbers approaching 1-5k per day (unless you're Rovio, who claims about 35k a day from Angry Birds on Android. The closest parallel I see to the App Store model is the arcade. Instead of a quarter a play, you pay a buck, but you don't have to shlep over to the mall to play with your friends since they're all on gamecenter or openfeint or Facebook and you can pester them about your score on your wall), and for a buck you get to keep the game. It's still a gold rush, but with no end to the vein in sight because there are people all over the world with a buck in their pocket ready to buy. But just like anything in life, you can't be horrifically bad at it and expect to make a killing.
- Duff 16y ago
  I disagree -- it's cutting out the middleman. The actual author is making more money and has more (ie. complete) editorial control over his art. Cutting out the middleman means returning things like writing to a craft rather than of an afterthought that is part of an industrial process of creating books. Instead needing an army of buyers, marketers, agents, retail placement specialists, etc, you return to the artist and his craft. There will be alot of crap produced -- but then most bookstores are full of crap books that have been filtered through literary agents and publishers. Do you trust a technical answer from "Programming for Idiots" more than an answer from Hacker News, just because some guy in NYC proofread the book?
Semiapies 16y ago
The actual, non-aggregated, article: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/guest-post-by-john-locke.html http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/guest-post-by-john-loc...
luckyisgood 16y ago
what do you think about this possible next step in e-book publishing: people will start selling thousands of e-books (actually: longer articles), all concentrating on popular, longtail keywords, and make a killing with that.
- paulgb 16y ago
  This guy has done exactly that, even automating the authoring of the books http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_M._Parker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_M._Parker
lsb 16y ago
There are always unintended consequences. The entire book publishing industry is funded by sales by mystery and romance. Make those easier to produce, and you lose the overhead to publish poetry, in much the same way that most newspapers don't have the overhead to fund the next Seymour Hersh disclosing the next My Lai or the next Abu Ghraib.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  But doesn't the flip also occur. Now poetry has less overhead to publish, so poets can publish their works w/o fighting a publisher. Although I do wonder, who buys and reads poetry. I can honestly say that in my entire life I don't think I know one person who does. I know a few people who write poetry as a hobby, but I've never actually met anyone who reads it. And I can't recall ever seeing someone on the subway reading a book of poetry.
  - lsb 16y ago
    I just bought Mary Oliver's Swan[1] and it's quite a great read. Also, I wrote a paper in grad school comparing the Brothers Grimm's Fairy Tales to Anne Sexton's Transformations[2] as Homer compared to Sappho, and they are a thauma widesthai, if you like Grimm stories reinterpreted by a slightly unstable Bostonian feminist. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Swan-Poems-Prose-Mary-Oliver/dp/0807068993 http://www.amazon.com/Swan-Poems-Prose-Mary-Oliver/dp/080706... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Transformations-Anne-Sexton/dp/061808343X http://www.amazon.com/Transformations-Anne-Sexton/dp/0618083...
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      I hate to poke you like a speciman in my lab, but when and where do you read poetry? In the evening do you read for hours or is it something you read on occassion while waiting for the microwave to buzz?
      - lsb 16y ago
        One of the benefits of working 9-5 at a company that makes a million dollars a day is that I have my weekends free. So I bike to Fresh Pond[1], to the Arboretum[2], or elsewhere, and read. It's like meditation, and it improves your vocabulary. [1] http://maps.google.com/maps?q=fresh+pond+02138 http://maps.google.com/maps?q=fresh+pond+02138 [2] http://maps.google.com/maps?q=arnold+arboretum+02130 http://maps.google.com/maps?q=arnold+arboretum+02130
ChuckMcM 16y ago
Great stuff. I agree its 'pulp fiction' in every sense of the word but its also defining the marginal cost of the creative effort as defined by scale. So if the author really clears $500K on a 'best seller', they can easily make a living selling 3 - 4 'stories' a year once they are known. Plus there is the long tail. Will this promote a lot of crap into the market? Absolutely. Will this create an economic opportunity for a crap filter? Absolutely. From 10,000 authors wanting to be heard to 'king maker' publishers whose job is to provide a selection along some theme or genre, an analog to Analog or Amazing Stories for example. Would an author be willing to give up 10% to the editor/curator? Who knows. That isn't an economic transaction with a lot of history yet. But it will happen, some new John Campbell of the world will emerge who can read 1,000 of these stories a month and suggest the top 10 or 15 that are 'worth' reading. If the average annual return on one of these stories is $50K and our editor person gets $5K of that, then each month they add another $75K to their income stream. The next story in the series : "Editor makes a killing telling folks the good stuff from the bad in the 99 cent e-book market."
- andyv 16y ago
  Actually, its pulp fiction without the pulp!
Zakharov 16y ago
This guy made $227k largely because he has very little competition in the 99c market. I don't think it's likely that "within 5 years, all digital books will cost 99 cents"; unless e-reader ownership dramatically increases, the market is not large enough to support the volume required to make many 99c books profitable.
- atgm 16y ago
  I disagree. He has made a lot of money in a 99-cent market populated by those particular readers. There's nothing to say that there isn't a 99-cent harlequin romance market, a 99-cent pulp sci-fi market, a 99-cent hard sci-fi market, a 99-cent cookbook ma-- you get the idea. Sure, there will be a lot of overlap in readers, but I don't think one or two people will flood all of those markets anytime soon.

72 points by cwan 16y ago

I'm most interested in the comments about the effect of lowering the price to 99c. Personally the price point and ease of purchase is key for me; I'll pay up to the cost of a cup of coffee for something if I think it will entertain me for a few minutes. As soon as the price point is over a cup of coffee I need to think for a little bit if I care enough to buy something, and most of the time I don't think it's worth the mental effort of deciding if I want something enough at that point. (As an interesting side note, indie PC games can cost two cups of coffee before I need to think about their purchase. That's just the valuation I fell into without planning.)

awj 16y ago
Yeah, in that respect the choice of 99c is interesting. Amazon switches from taking 70% of the price to taking 30% of the price at $2.99. Granted, we're now coming down to "what do you mean by coffee", but that's still less than your average somethingacchino at starbucks.

bkaid 16y ago

The app store effect on pricing will be coming to ebooks. With e-books being way overpriced (sometimes more than the print version), this has to be a good thing for consumers and authors - at least to an extent.

Semiapies 16y ago
I hope more ebook publishers (both individuals and companies) look at this. There are too many outlets that think they can sell a file for most of the price of a physical book - usually the same outlets that have been blaming their price hikes on the rising cost of paper for the last 30 years.
- sethg 16y ago
  The last time I saw this discussion go around the SF blogosphere, people close to the industry said that very little of the cost of a book is actually tied up in the marginal cost of paper and shipping; most of it is overhead associated with running a publishing company that can’t be economized away by switching to e-books. On the other hand, Kristine Kathryn Rusch said that one reason the overhead is so high is that publishers locked themselves into long-term contracts for things like Manhattan editorial offices and printers’ services, so they can’t reduce their overheads until those contracts expire.
  - Semiapies 16y ago
    I'm particularly thinking of niche and hobby presses that don't have Manhattan offices. Some of them have tried to straight-up sell ebooks at paper prices.

muhfuhkuh 16y ago

It's the return of the penny dreadful. Kids (and the young at heart) dreaming of adventure and hack-n-slash violence read these cheap little pulp paperbacks about horseback robbers and high seas pirate swashbucklers. Two significant changes, now: It's had to adjust for inflation, but I think the convenience of getting it beamed to your device instantaneously makes up for it. The second is that the overwhelming majority of the readership is women (in the comments of the original interview, Locke suggests that his readership is up to 80% women who fantasize, as they read his exploits, about "changing" the protagonist for the better). Welcome to the indie economy revolution. First they came for the apps (the vast majority of the top 100 paid in the App Store and Marketplace are from indie developers), 1-5 team houses that need only split their massive spoils a few ways; and the numbers are massive if memory serves; something like $10000 a day for a top 10 game, and that's _after_ Apple's vig. And, those who choose free with ads or freemium on Android, can see numbers approaching 1-5k per day (unless you're Rovio, who claims about 35k a day from Angry Birds on Android. The closest parallel I see to the App Store model is the arcade. Instead of a quarter a play, you pay a buck, but you don't have to shlep over to the mall to play with your friends since they're all on gamecenter or openfeint or Facebook and you can pester them about your score on your wall), and for a buck you get to keep the game. It's still a gold rush, but with no end to the vein in sight because there are people all over the world with a buck in their pocket ready to buy. But just like anything in life, you can't be horrifically bad at it and expect to make a killing.

Duff 16y ago
I disagree -- it's cutting out the middleman. The actual author is making more money and has more (ie. complete) editorial control over his art. Cutting out the middleman means returning things like writing to a craft rather than of an afterthought that is part of an industrial process of creating books. Instead needing an army of buyers, marketers, agents, retail placement specialists, etc, you return to the artist and his craft. There will be alot of crap produced -- but then most bookstores are full of crap books that have been filtered through literary agents and publishers. Do you trust a technical answer from "Programming for Idiots" more than an answer from Hacker News, just because some guy in NYC proofread the book?

Semiapies 16y ago

The actual, non-aggregated, article: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/guest-post-by-john-locke.html http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/guest-post-by-john-loc...

luckyisgood 16y ago

what do you think about this possible next step in e-book publishing: people will start selling thousands of e-books (actually: longer articles), all concentrating on popular, longtail keywords, and make a killing with that.

paulgb 16y ago
This guy has done exactly that, even automating the authoring of the books http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_M._Parker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_M._Parker

lsb 16y ago

There are always unintended consequences. The entire book publishing industry is funded by sales by mystery and romance. Make those easier to produce, and you lose the overhead to publish poetry, in much the same way that most newspapers don't have the overhead to fund the next Seymour Hersh disclosing the next My Lai or the next Abu Ghraib.

kenjackson 16y ago
But doesn't the flip also occur. Now poetry has less overhead to publish, so poets can publish their works w/o fighting a publisher. Although I do wonder, who buys and reads poetry. I can honestly say that in my entire life I don't think I know one person who does. I know a few people who write poetry as a hobby, but I've never actually met anyone who reads it. And I can't recall ever seeing someone on the subway reading a book of poetry.
- lsb 16y ago
  I just bought Mary Oliver's Swan[1] and it's quite a great read. Also, I wrote a paper in grad school comparing the Brothers Grimm's Fairy Tales to Anne Sexton's Transformations[2] as Homer compared to Sappho, and they are a thauma widesthai, if you like Grimm stories reinterpreted by a slightly unstable Bostonian feminist. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Swan-Poems-Prose-Mary-Oliver/dp/0807068993 http://www.amazon.com/Swan-Poems-Prose-Mary-Oliver/dp/080706... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Transformations-Anne-Sexton/dp/061808343X http://www.amazon.com/Transformations-Anne-Sexton/dp/0618083...
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    I hate to poke you like a speciman in my lab, but when and where do you read poetry? In the evening do you read for hours or is it something you read on occassion while waiting for the microwave to buzz?
    - lsb 16y ago
      One of the benefits of working 9-5 at a company that makes a million dollars a day is that I have my weekends free. So I bike to Fresh Pond[1], to the Arboretum[2], or elsewhere, and read. It's like meditation, and it improves your vocabulary. [1] http://maps.google.com/maps?q=fresh+pond+02138 http://maps.google.com/maps?q=fresh+pond+02138 [2] http://maps.google.com/maps?q=arnold+arboretum+02130 http://maps.google.com/maps?q=arnold+arboretum+02130

ChuckMcM 16y ago

Great stuff. I agree its 'pulp fiction' in every sense of the word but its also defining the marginal cost of the creative effort as defined by scale. So if the author really clears $500K on a 'best seller', they can easily make a living selling 3 - 4 'stories' a year once they are known. Plus there is the long tail. Will this promote a lot of crap into the market? Absolutely. Will this create an economic opportunity for a crap filter? Absolutely. From 10,000 authors wanting to be heard to 'king maker' publishers whose job is to provide a selection along some theme or genre, an analog to Analog or Amazing Stories for example. Would an author be willing to give up 10% to the editor/curator? Who knows. That isn't an economic transaction with a lot of history yet. But it will happen, some new John Campbell of the world will emerge who can read 1,000 of these stories a month and suggest the top 10 or 15 that are 'worth' reading. If the average annual return on one of these stories is $50K and our editor person gets $5K of that, then each month they add another $75K to their income stream. The next story in the series : "Editor makes a killing telling folks the good stuff from the bad in the 99 cent e-book market."

andyv 16y ago
Actually, its pulp fiction without the pulp!

Zakharov 16y ago

This guy made $227k largely because he has very little competition in the 99c market. I don't think it's likely that "within 5 years, all digital books will cost 99 cents"; unless e-reader ownership dramatically increases, the market is not large enough to support the volume required to make many 99c books profitable.

atgm 16y ago
I disagree. He has made a lot of money in a 99-cent market populated by those particular readers. There's nothing to say that there isn't a 99-cent harlequin romance market, a 99-cent pulp sci-fi market, a 99-cent hard sci-fi market, a 99-cent cookbook ma-- you get the idea. Sure, there will be a lot of overlap in readers, but I don't think one or two people will flood all of those markets anytime soon.