4 ms·
Are you actually losing $Xk worth of sales every month due to piracy though? I remember this author with a wildly influential book inside a small online communi
by password1 4y ago
Are you actually losing $Xk worth of sales every month due to piracy though? I remember this author with a wildly influential book inside a small online community. He too claimed that due to piracy he suffered great economical loss. He posted a detailed account of this on his blog and i delved on it a bit and I came to the conclusion he was delusional. For sure piracy dented his revenue, that was without the shadow of a doubt. But the major reason that he lost revenue was due to the fact that a book, as with many products, has a lifecycle and he wasn't considering that as a factor at all.
His book was considered "the bible" of that subject, but it was also starting to become old and the community was becoming more established. At that point there were tutorials, youtube videos, other resources talking about the same thing, explaining concepts of that book and so on. So while, in the beginning a user strictly needed to buy the book to have access to those niche information, now info were more readily accessible (even the reddit wiki had basically the same stuff in it). So buying the book was more of a choice ONLY if the user wanted to dive deeper into the subject. All the rest of potential users that a few years back would have bought the book due to the "monopoly of information", now weren't interested in it anymore. Even more established community users only recommended the book as an advanced thing for people that wanted to go to the next step. That's quite an evolution for a product that is guaranteed to lower sales.
Besides this, the community was still relatively niche and this means that doesn't have a huge influx of new users. This means that over time people won't buy his book because the only people interested in it already have it.
The product lifecycle was clear from the data and kinda textbook behavior, with the product having surpassed it's mature phase and been declining. On top of this, for sure piracy further made things worse.
The point is that the author was convinced that piracy was the only reason revenue was dropping. He was convinced that his book (being influential et all in the community) would give him constant revenue potentially forever. That was delusional and so was his analysis.
Are you entirely sure that piracy is the only thing to blame? Maybe that's just one factor in a more complex situation and writing another book is specifically what you need to do. The previous one was successful, you have a brand and an audience to leverage. That's valuable and, maybe you just need to develop a new product because the old one is, well, getting old.