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Originally Posted by gideongallery
(Post 17912393)
if you had 1/100 the marketing skill you think you do, you would know how easy it is to get found on the free torrent sites.
when you factor in how much the book publishers/music studio take you really don't need a big audience to make as much money as an established artist.
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All I am saying is that Gaiman is an established author and that helps him greatly. He puts his book up for free on a website and there were likely a lot of people who like him telling their friends to download it. He has the advantage of being an established name. The argument is also made in this thread that a similar thing can be said for the success of the Radiohead record they gave away. They benefited greatly from 10 years and millions of dollars of marketing.
I understand that if you sell it on your own and keep the profit for yourself you can make some good money and not have to sell as much to do so. As much as an established artist? I guess that depends on how good you are at marketing it and how well your plan works.
Let's do some basic math. Say an established writer puts out a new book and it sells 100,000 copies in hardback. Assume that writer gets about 15% of the cover price in royalties so they are making around $3.75 per book (this is high, most authors will make around $2.00 per book sold, but we are talking about someone who is established and can negotiate a better deal). So they make $375K in sales. Assume they will sell three times that number in paperback and make about $1.15 per book. That means the paperback makes them another $345K. This doesn't count potential audio book sales or movie rights or anything else, just book sales. Total this established writer sold half a million books worldwide and made around $720K.
Now let's assume an unknown writer is going to sell their book via torrent. Maybe they give half of it away for free or they give one book for free in order to sell another. Whatever it is that they do they have a book they will sell and they will charge a little less for it because they are unknown and they will only sell it via e-book so they can keep almost all of the profit for themselves. So assume they are going to charge $17.95 for this book. Subtract 3-4% for credit card processing, site design, hosting etc. That means they will make around $17.45 per book sold. That is a very nice amount. This means they only have to sell 41,260 books in order to make the same amount as the established author does selling 500K books. Could it be done? I guess it is possible, but I highly doubt it. The unknown author not only has to market the book, but convince people to give them a chance. They have to convince people to read their book and not a book by some better known author.
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wow so the equivalent of giving away an entire book is 2-3 pages of 20 second clips.
you are really clueless about this issue aren't you.
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Actually, when you look on the big scale of things, it is. When you look at his body of work he has about 17 books that he has written. 6 of these are regular book and he has written about 11 juvenile/young adult fiction books/collections. Add in the hundreds of comic books and graphic novels he has written and makes a full body of work. He gives away one book in order to sell the other 16 plus the comics. So it is pretty similar giving away short clips in an effort to sell the entire movie/site. He is giving them a taste of his work in hopes that they will buy all the other stuff he has to offer.
This is also an advantage he has over an unknown author when it comes to giving his product away. Even if we are just talking about novels, he can give one away in order to promote/sell the other 5. An unknown person likely only has 1 book done so they will have to figure out how to give it away and sell it at the same time.
I'm not saying an unestablished writer couldn't do it, I'm just saying that I think it would be a lot harder than you make it out to be. I would challenge you to show me one example of an unknown writer doing this and being largely successful with it.