A self-publisher at home in his lab. (Photo: Seattle Municipal Archives)

Best of all for the rest of us, he says he will document the process and share the results, which means any writer or publisher curious about digital distribution will be able to benefit from whatever happens. I’m rooting for ya, Doctorow.

I also think it might be interesting to look at this experiment in the context of three other online distribution experiments.

When Stephen King salted the earth

One thing that strikes me about about Doctorow’s planned roll-out, which includes everything from free ebooks and audiobooks to $250 limited edition hardcovers, is how much more sophisticated his offering is compared to something a much more popular writer tried nearly 10 years ago.

In 2000, Stephen King, working with his publisher, attempted to serialize a novel-in-progress titled “The Plant” on his website using an honor-based payment system. In 2000, your options for digital reading consisted mainly of your computer or a Palm Pilot/Handspring, and King’s experiment was therefore a lot less ambitious: he’d post chapters of the novel online, as he wrote them, and he’d expect readers to pay $1 per chapter.

King and his publisher expected, or at least wanted, most everyone to pay–freeloaders would be tolerated, but minimally. King said if at least 75% of readers didn’t pay with each new chapter, he’d pull the plug on the serialization. By the fourth or fifth chapter, King raised the price per chapter and paying readers plummeted, and he killed the project.

(Here’s a fun anecdote from a reader’s perspective: I was one of those paying per chapter and getting engrossed in the story, and I was furious at King when he killed it. It made me not want to support him on future books. Maybe not every reader felt that way, but hey, I did. It also made me realize that a writer should either ask for money up front or ask for money after, but never hold the work hostage during. Constantly threatening to abandon the story due to the actions beyond the reader’s control isn’t going to endear you to many readers.)

By contrast, the primary methods by which Doctorow will roll-out his new book seems designed to cater to freeloaders: he’s offering high-quality, free ebooks and audiobooks, licensed so that readers can manipulate them into other (equally free, as demanded by the license) works.

That’s a huge reversal from what King expected from readers in 2000. Doctorow seems to expect that the majority of readers sampling his work won’t pay, but that enough will that it will work out profitably in the end. Why would he think that? Well, he’s been offering free ebook editions of each of his books since he started publishing, and he’s a successful midlist author now. It’s not proof that giving away your work to some degree will eventually bring in buyers, but Doctorow has said he suspects the free copies work as advertising, bringing in fresh readers who, sometimes, turn into paying readers down the line².

Is “free” really just a long-term ad campaign?

And that brings me to another recent online example in giving something away for free in order to drive sales, although in this case the digital entertainment isn’t a book but a videogame.

Earlier this month, the indie developers of an enormously popular and respected videogame called “World of Goo” held a “pay what you want” sale, where you could give as little as one cent to download a Windows, Mac, or Linux version of the game. The company, 2D Boy, documented the results (part 1 is here, and part 2 is here) in a way that I hope Doctorow does as well.

Some things that I thought were interesting about the experiment:

• A significant portion of consumers elected to pay the minimum, one cent. When 2D Boy announced halfway through the sale that they only made money on purchases of 30 cents or higher, the average payment increased. Takeaway: if you’re honest about things like transaction costs, more customers will adjust their payment accordingly to avoid hurting your bottom line.
• There was a considerable price gap between Windows and Mac users (although Macs paid slightly more) compared to Linux users. Linux users seem to have been willing to pay a higher price for the content. Is this because Linux users are more familiar with the concept of paying what you think the author/developer deserves instead of what you think you can get away with? Or is this because Linux users simply aren’t the mainstream, and their very adoption of an open-source operating system means they have strong opinions on how honor payment systems should work? Whatever the reason, this price gap does seem to illustrate that when you expand to the mass marketplace, you’re going to attract more freeloaders, or more cheapskates, or likely both. You may be able to persuade them to pay more through education, but the jury’s still out on that.
• They sold 83,250 copies of the game. I don’t follow the videogame industry enough to know how that ranks to other independently-published games, and at least some of those sales were from existing customers buying copies of the game for other operating systems, but even a conservative estimate should mean that 2D Boy attracted 50,000 or more new customers on an aging game. These are customers who will now personally experience the 2D Boy brand and be more likely to pay attention to their next game release.
• Most important, perhaps: the sale bumped up full-price sales of their game on third-party reseller sites. On Steam, a PC game reseller, sales rose 40% relative to the previous week. On WiiWare, the game store on the Nintendo Wii, sales rose 9% relative to the previous week.

Taking those last two points into consideration, is it possible to use “pay what you want” sales as an advertising campaign in disguise? And if so, is it possible to adjust the minimum price point so that the immediate net cost of the campaign is positive? I don’t usually get giddy about marketing, but the idea of actually making money off of an ad campaign makes me grin deviously. (That’s “giddy” for me.)

Introducing the mass-commission

Finally, I wanted to look at something another writer is doing to make money off of publishing without relying on mainstream publishers.

Robin Sloan is well-known by a subset of web-type people, or at least that’s what I gather from Googling him. To be honest, I don’t know who he is. What I do know, however, is he just raised over $12,000 from future readers in order to fund the writing of a novel he just finished earlier this month. I donated a dollar, and I will receive a digital copy of the book when he’s through editing it. Like Doctorow, Sloan created a tiered approach that lets readers self-select the amount they’re willing to pay–each step up the ladder of donations brings more copies, or an acknowledgment, or an autograph.

My first thought, after I absorbed what he did: I hate you, Robin Sloan, for thinking of this before I did. My second thought: Can other writers replicate his success? (Should King dust off The Plant and head on over to Kickstarter?)

Doctorow has already incorporated this strategy, in a way. As part of his experiment, he planned to offer a commissioned original short story for $10,000. Before he could make a public announcement, the guy who developed Ubuntu bought it from him over breakfast, so this strategy won’t be tested among general readers this time around.

But Sloan’s experiment worked and it worked among readers closer to the norm, not with a multimillionaire. Although Sloan won’t receive royalties from his book, he’s getting a fairly decent advance for a first-time novel that’s bypassing a publishing house and going straight from author to readers. And of course, any profit he makes from direct sales will remain entirely with him.

I have no idea if other writers can pull the same trick; certainly unpublished unknowns will find it hard to attract open wallets without first demonstrating that they have a talent worth investing in. But for authors who can reach a certain level of visibility first, or who can find a way to market themselves well, it may be possible to tap into your readership directly for an advance.

Isn’t this all fascinating stuff, seeing what writers and other content creators are doing to promote and sell their work?

By contrast, here’s the sort of stuff publishers are focusing on right now: finding a way to keep readers from lending books to each other. No seriously, check it out:

So, why are publishers opposed to the Nook’s crippled ebook sharing scheme? As one Unnamed Publishing Executive told Publishers Lunch:

“If publishers agree to lending then every ebook offer now and in the future will come with this consumer feature. Over time, I’m concerned that lending won’t grow the market and in fact could hurt it.”

I thought the gatekeepers were supposed to improve the quality of content and add value to it, not find ways to restrict its consumption by readers.

Hopefully experiments like these will gradually be absorbed into the mainstream publishing houses and benefit everyone–writers, readers, and even, despite their worst intentions, publishers.

“Doctorow’s Project: With a Little Help” [Publishers Weekly]

Footnotes! Hooray!

2. To be fair to King, as a known blockbuster author he occupies a different position in the marketplace; his concerns are likely more focused on people wanting free entertainment from a known brand than on people not knowing who he is. What we really need is a blockbuster writer like King who will attempt something on the scale of Doctorow’s plan–the publishing world’s equivalent of Radiohead and their free album release experiment or NIN’s ongoing free music releases. (click here to return to the post)

Because it’s his own hard work at stake, suddenly everything we know about digital piracy–that its effects on sales are complicated and not always negative, and that it doesn’t always cannibalize existing markets–is thrown out the window by Pogue as he obsesses over raising his family and making enough money to put his kid through school.

At one point, he writes that his current DRM–the printed page–is virtual unbreakable. This is obviously untrue, and in fact the printed page is among the easiest formats to repurpose, requiring little more than some off-the-shelf hardware and software (a scanner, an OCR program) and lots and lots of hours of laborious scanning, converting, and assembling. The fact that nobody has done it, or that I don’t care to do it at any rate, has more to do with how much I value the content than with the “difficulty” of the format. (By contrast, I am seriously considering scanning in some of my Cynthia Ozick and Isak Dinesen books so that I can enjoy them on my Kindle, since their publishers haven’t made them available.)

Publishers are at the rear of the various media facing a digital revolution. I keep hoping this means they’ll learn from the mistakes of others, but most of the noise out there so far–from publishers and authors–seems to indicate a fresh new wave of resistance and FUD.

I hope Pogue and his publisher were paying attention to what Viacom and News Corp execs were saying at a recent TV conference. They work in a medium that faces far greater threats from digital piracy, and yet sound braver, more knowledgable, and even more profit-minded than Pogue:

The answer to digital piracy isn’t simply fighting it — find new business models or prepare to die.

Such was the refrain of News Corp. prexy Peter Chernin in remarks made during the opening-panel discussion at National Cable and Telecommunications Assn.’s annual confab, which opened Sunday.

Viacom prexy-chief Philippe Dauman said branding was likely the best way to survive challenges posed by digital distribution.

…

“I’m not a skeptic,” Chernin said. “We look at this as an opportunity, hopefully profitable. The challenge is how do we protect our margins, especially our margins of existing distribution. We’ve got to look at new forms of distribution as an opportunity for content providers.”

…

“We all have a vested interest in protecting copyright,” Chernin said. “But we all need to find the best ways to deliver our content to customers where and when they want it and at an affordable price. If we do not find a legal way to do that, people will find illegal ways.”

Fighting piracy alone, Chernin elaborated, would not be enough.

“To the degree we’re only trying to protect existing business, we’re toast,” he said. “All we’re doing there is staving off the inevitable. We’ll be dinosaurs sentencing ourselves to extinction.”

Chernin emphasized that more time needs to be spent developing new business models than protecting old ones.

“A digital dodge for piracy; Industry toppers dig digital at confab”, William Triplett, Daily Variety, 18 May 2008

Instead of being on the defensive, reluctant publishers and authors like Pogue must embrace an offensive strategy. If they continue to avoid digital publishing, they’ll certainly still survive–I can’t imagine print going away any time in the next fifty years at the least–but they’ll be doing a disservice to themselves and their present and future readers.

One easy way to create a digital version of Pogue’s books–and this holds true for every sort of manual or guide (and it’s not like this is my brilliant idea–it’s been discussed elsewhere) is to release updates. If you know that buying an ebook copy of Pogue’s book includes the next three edition updates free or at a reduced cost, versus sniffing out and downloading illegal copies each time, the vast majority of normal consumers will opt for the paid version, both out of fairness and convenience*.

Another option is to build an ebook platform on an advertising-based model, such as Adobe’s ad-supported PDF program that uses Yahoo! ads.

But the last thing Pogue or any author should do is run screaming from ebooks. Ignoring it completely is probably still okay for the bulk of established writers, but they’ll be missing out from the opportunities that the ebook format offers. And annoying me to no end.

*There’s a huge caveat to this idea of “fair” customers who are willing to buy instead of pirate–if publishers don’t price digital versions fairly, they’ll lose the upper hand in this conversation. So what’s fair? Subtract printing, binding, shipping, warehousing, pulping, selling to retail booksellers. That’s fair.