Is this the future of making money as a writer? One of the most popular higher-price rewards from my Kickstarter campaign for a new story collection was this: A handwritten manuscript of the first draft of a story, along with a printed copy of the final version and the pen with which the first draft was written.
The case is re-purposed from a set of silver coins from the Franklin Mint. I painted the exterior, then created a felt liner with a bed shaped to receive the pen. Here my assistant, Malva, is verifying that the pen can be used as a toy as well as a writing instrument.
I have started this blog because I've been fighting the piracy of ebooks...and wondering if there was any point in doing so. It's so easy to steal intellectual property now that I'm beginning to wonder if electronic text will have any commercial value. Will it be possible for writers of books and stories to make a living from their work in the future? Musicians have been able to move away from a model of earning from record sales to a model of giving concerts. But it doesn't seem likely that writers would be able to charge money for oral performances of their writing.
Publishing is changing, and with it, the notion of the monetary value of texts. People do still enjoy reading, but they may be less and less willing to pay for books when they can get a pirated edition of any text they want in electronic form for free.
I have started this blog as a place to post my thoughts about where writers might go from here, and particularly where I intend to go from here.
Interesting questions! I'm very interested in this issue because e-publishing is currently taking it's first steps in my country. E-books in my language are still expensive and rare, but the situation is about to change.
ReplyDeleteBecause of the nature of ebooks, pricing is almost certain to be a race to the bottom. The costs of production are all up front in the writing, the editing, and the design of cover. Once that work is done, the cost of making copies and distributing them is almost nothing provided that you use an existing distribution channel.
ReplyDeleteSo if the only distribution channels for ebooks in, say, Finland, are charging relatively high prices for electronic texts, then some enterprising competitors will sell their own titles on, say, Amazon U.K. or the German Amazon. The inconvenience of a site that sells in English or German might prove to be only a small barrier to Finnish readers who learn that they can get ebooks for much less than what domestic channels charge. And the relatively high prices of Finnish ebooks will encourage domestic entrepreneurs to set up their own ebook businesses with lower prices.
How long will it take for ebooks to be as common as paper books in all languages? That's impossible to say. But it's bound to happen. The technology of the readers just gets better and better.