A little while ago, we pointed out that the ebook for the book Appetite for Self-Destruction -- all about the recording industry's clueless strategic moves -- was amusingly priced higher than the physical copies of the book. It seemed rather ironic that a book about how the recording industry couldn't deal with digital would show such clueless pricing. However, apparently this is not the only such case. Copycense, which pointed us to that pricing conundrum, has been highlighting a bunch of other ebooks that are more expensive than hardcopy books, and has found one that's perhaps even more ridiculous: a book about clueless media bosses. The book is actually called The Curse of the Mogul: What's Wrong with the World's Leading Media Companies, and as of this posting, the pricing certainly suggests what's wrong with the world's leading publishing companies.
The Kindle ebook version is a whopping $18.99. Yet, if you actually want to kill some trees, the Hardcover is $10.51. The paperback is $11.56. And that's just if you order from Amazon directly. If you order from an Amazon partner, you can actually get the hardcover for $2.96 new or $2.49 used. And someone thinks it makes sense to price this book (of all books) at $18.99 as an ebook?
It's as if the publishing industry has learned absolutely nothing from the difficulties other industries have had in adjusting to digital goods.
I kind of don't know where to begin with this blog post from comic artist Colleen Doran at The Hill -- the place where "law makers blog" -- about how awful "piracy" is? Anyway, she seems extremely angry, mixing in vitriolic and pedantic scorn with flashes that she actually understands what's happening... and then ignores it for more scorn. It's really kind of weird. For instance, a few quotes from the article:
"For more than 20 years, I've written and drawn comics for a variety of major publishers: Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image and Disney. Like many artists, I've seen my sales figures chipped away as the print market shrinks due, in no small part, to rampant online piracy."
No evidence to back that up, of course. Just a statement of fact, that isn't a fact. Oh well....
"I made my comic series, A Distant Soil, available as a free webcomic less than two years ago. Despite assurances that the many sites pirating my work were doing me a favor with their “free advertising” I never saw a single incoming link from them, saw no increase in traffic, and made virtually no money."
Hold on, let me get this straight. You offered it for free, the "pirate" sites offered it for free... and you STILL lost traffic to those sites? Methinks perhaps that if you, the creator of the comic, can't differentiate yourself from filesharing sites that offer fans no connection with you, no insight into the work, no expertise in the offering, and no personal involvement with the creator, then that is YOUR problem, not the "pirates." For God's sake, people want your stuff! And you were smart enough to price the content the same as the unauthorized places! All you had left to do was offer them something the pirate sites couldn't, and you'd be home free!
Instead, she expected money to just show up at her doorstep. Which is strange, because money doesn't tend to do that....
"Frequent original content (often pirated the day I post it,) increased my traffic, not pirate "advertising." Pirates draw traffic from my site, and cost me millions of hits annually, which cuts my advertising revenue."
Again, in the first sentence she gets it! Keep creating and releasing! If your goal is to draw readers to YOUR site, one way to do that is to ALWAYS have the most up to date offerings of your creative work, and you do that by continuing to create. And pirate SITES don't draw traffic from yours, they draw traffic from the great pool of web surfers. You're both drawing against each other, and YOU have the advantage!
"Readers assume they are only nickel and diming rich corporations with their bit torrent naughtiness, but I am a middle class artist and farmer for whom a few thousand dollars a year in lost income means I can't afford health insurance."
Come on now. You're a 47 year old cartoonist/artist that's been pumping out works, both for publishing companies and some self-published, since you were 12 years old. You're a GOOD artist. There's no need to make plays on our sympathies by mentioning the other things you choose to do, like "farming". That isn't what we're talking about. That kind of transparent attempt to play the victim does not move the discussion forward. Oh, and bit torrent naughtiness is a great name for a forward-looking cyberpunk porn thriller....
"Creators and publishers can’t compete with free and the frightening reality is that even free isn’t good enough. Pirates aggregate content in ways creators and legit publishers can’t. Why go to dozens of web pages for entertainment when you can go to a pirate and get everything you want? There’s no connection to creators as human beings who work hard and make money from that work, and who need income from past work to finance future work."
Sigh. Can't compete with free? Then you can't compete period. Because if all you have to offer is what others can manage to offer for free, then you don't actually have anything to offer to start with. Thing is, you DO have something to offer... you just don't seem to want to offer it. Oh, and that last part, about there being no connection between fans and creators? That's YOUR job, not the fans'. You have to make that connection. We're not mindless moths, fluttering about the heat of your light, desperate to slam our bodies against the fixture. You connect with us, since you're doing the selling, not the other way around....
Case in point? Just a few weeks ago, Techdirt had a couple of posts about someone in the IDENTICAL position to you. Comic artist Steve Lieber. Just like you, he had his works "pirated" on these sites. What did he do? He went and engaged with them and realized they were some of his biggest fans and saw his sales jump by a MASSIVE amount.
And that proves the point, doesn't it? It's not the people copying who are the problem. If you actually worked at engaging with the audience and giving them a reason to buy, they will.
"Everyone gets paid -- manufacturers of computers, iPads, electricity, bandwidth -- everyone except the creators of content."
Ah, so no content creators are getting paid? Funny, there seems to be an awful lot of stuff out there -- including those in the same position as you. Oh, and the internet isn't NEW anymore, okay? And it has yet to create a barren wasteland devoid of downloadable content. With all the evil piraters out there, how could that be?
"It costs big bucks to finance these pirate sites. Major advertisers and open source ad providers like Google pay them."
Google bad? Then why does it feel so good? I assume, since Google is evil, that you have gone directly to your robots.txt and made sure you aren't indexed? Also, it's not Google who's "paying them," which sounds like Google has them on the payroll. They're putting ads on their sites and competing. You can do that too -- and, if you engage with your fans, they'll focus on going to where you want them to go.
The best part is the tagline at the end of the story:
"Colleen Doran is a cartoonist and illustrator with more than 500 credits for companies as diverse as Lucasfilm, Disney, Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Random House, Houghton Mifflin, Harper Collins, and Image Comics. Her work includes illustrations for Captain America, Sandman, Wonder Woman, Amazing Spider-man and many others."
Again, Colleen, you're just so far ahead of the game here that it almost feels strange to see what you've written. That's quite a list of paid work, some which I imagine you could build upon to solidify your reputation and garner even more paid work. Through your own talent and hard work, you're set up to really be able to work with new media and emerging business models. Why not really dig down and embrace them?
About a year ago, we had a discussion about some comments made by Garry Trudeau, the creator of the comic strip Doonesbury, which has been an institution for 40 years or so. That post was in response to claims by Trudeau that the web was no place for comics to make money, and that the only hope for comics in the new digital era was to have the newspapers "come to their senses" and gate off all internet content behind a paywall of some sort. He effectively was looking for ways to turn the new world back into the old. We noted that perhaps Trudeau should check out the success of webcomics like Randall Munroe's xkcd, which showed how a webcomic could not just exist online, but thrive online -- with a very strong business model to support it.
Slate: Where is the comic strip headed in the post-daily-print-newspaper age? Is the medium healthy?
There's not much future in being a strip artist now. That's quite a turnaround in fortunes, because presiding over an established syndicated comic strip used to be the closest thing to tenure that popular culture offered. If I were starting out now, I'd probably continue on the graphic design trajectory I was on before I got sidetracked with comics. Colbert-like TV would be OK, too, except you have to be brilliant. I advise young cartoonists now to get into graphic novels--or head for Pixar.
Again, in general, our response is similar to what it was last time around. Thinking that there's no future in a space where we're already seeing creative individuals carve out quite impressive models seems pretty silly.
However, there was a fascinating deconstruction of Trudeau's comments on the PVPonline blog, suggesting that Trudeau is correct... in talking about the lack of a future for those who want a career like the traditional syndicated comic strip artist. The folks who have lived off of that model for years probably don't have much of a future, because they're so used to making money in one way, that they're not quite prepared to make the jump -- even if there is plenty of money to be made.
Furthermore, the post picks up on that line about tenure, and how that's really the key here:
Boy, isn't that the truth? And isn't that the real reason that syndicates are getting less and less for their features every year? Because presiding over an established syndicated comic strip is tenure for both the creator and their syndicate partner. Just put it on auto-pilot until the artist dies, then get a new artist and put the auto-pilot back on.
In this interview, Garry discusses his friends Gary Larsen and Bill Watterson, both who felt the time had come to retire from cartooning. And having read interviews with both of those cartoonists, they seem like creators very uncomfortable with the idea of "tenure." But again, how feasible is it for a cartoonist with 20 plus years under his belt to re-invent what they do or start from scratch?
I do a lot of soul searching about what I do for a living. I think about it a lot. The last thing I want to do is take it for granted. And as I reflect on my one measly decade of cartooning, I see an obvious pattern. It's during the times I was most comfortable that things started falling apart. And it was during the moments of struggle, upheaval, change and dissatisfaction with my work that I turned the most important corners.
I think there's actually a much larger point here that applies to much of what we write here at Techdirt. So many of the legacy business models that we talk about really are a kind of "tenure." They're on autopilot. The major record labels know how to sell CDs. Give them a certain type of artist, and they can sell a huge number of units. It's autopilot. But that kind of "tenure" and "autopilot" is going away (or perhaps is already gone).
To be successful today there is no autopilot. There is no magic bullet. It involves constant innovating and refinement -- and that's quite difficult to deal with for those who have had "tenure" for years. The idea behind tenure at universities is that it encourages professors to feel free to research what they want, free of pressure from the university. And that works for some. But, for many, it also means the opposite: with tenure, you can just keep going, without working on anything special or worrying about doing anything big. And that's what we've seen in all sorts of legacy industries that effectively stagnated, due to the easy money of a "tenured" sort of position. But the new digital world is one where there aren't any tenured business models. This doesn't mean you can't make money (or even lots of money -- you can). But it involves constantly evolving, experimenting and innovating. And many of us think that's a good thing.
I spent last week at the Monaco Media Forum, which was quite an event overall. Of course, as with many such events, many of the most interesting and valuable parts happen outside of the main sessions in the conversations and meetings you have with people separate from the scheduled topics. The good thing that I took away from the event was a pretty wide sense of optimism about the vast media world that we're heading into. Having attended plenty of entertainment industry conferences lately, which seem to be surrounded by doom & gloom predictions, this event was blissfully full of a pretty optimistic viewpoint, which was refreshing and a bit encouraging. Of course, as a caveat on that, there really weren't that many actual media people at the event. Instead, there were lots of technology/infrastructure companies as well as ad and marketing firms -- and all of those have plenty of incentives to be as optimistic as possible. Perhaps it's the media folks who are depressed... but they stayed away.
One exception was James Murdoch, who was actually a "co-chair" of the event, and he gave an interview discussing a wide range of things that are happening around News Corp. The entire video is about 37 minutes, but it's quite interesting:
Having questioned many of James Murdoch's recent statements on paywalls and copyright, I have to say that my initial impression was actually to be impressed. Here's a guy who -- without much experience -- is running a huge swath of the media industry around the world, and seems to have a very strong working knowledge of what's going on across the board, and can speak knowledgeably about them all. Many people I spoke with at the event felt the same way. On top of that, I actually agreed with many of the larger points he made about innovation, and the need to make bets on innovating, rather than just protecting their businesses and milking them for cash.
However, when he got down to the specifics, I went back to questioning many of his assumptions, and thinking that his world view may, in fact, be a bit skewed by his previous success (after, it should be noted... a string of failures, not mentioned at the interview) at BSkyB, a satellite TV provider in the UK. The more the interview went on, the more I realized that Murdoch appears to view much of the media world through that lens, and seems to saying that, in the end, the media world will end up like a giant pay TV system, with a big subscription. I think this is more wishful thinking, rather than where the internet is actually heading, and treating the internet that way will almost certainly result in failure -- such as with his paywall experiments.
He talks up the various successes with pay television (satellite and cable) around the globe, including Italy, Germany and India, and again that seems to influence his views. He points out, repeatedly, that no one really thought that going into those markets would work, but News Corp. proved all the doubters wrong -- as he no doubt believes the doubters on the internet will also be proven wrong. He gets into the discussion with the following statement, which got most of the attention (and a bunch of Twitter messages of support from those in the audience):
I think there's a lot of talk about monetizing content and there was hand-wringing and for years and years... I remember in the late 90s I was in Singapore, and people were talking about mobile media and what is it going to be and what are the killer apps and all that sorta stuff... And I guess, I just look at it more simply. I think the first rule of is if you're going to monetize something is that you should probably not give it away for free.
This is at 14:25 in the video, and you really have to see the sarcastic eye rolls when he says that last line. And, you can immediately hear the laughter in the audience (which was much louder). But here's the thing: he's wrong. And he must know that he's wrong. Media businesses have made tons of money for years while giving away stuff for free. The very, very successful network television business (of which News Corp. owns one), for example, was always based on giving stuff away for free, but selling the attention of viewers. The newspaper business (which is where News Corp. originated) wasn't based on giving away stuff for "free" totally, but on subscriptions that never even covered the cost of printing and delivery.
No, this doesn't mean everything should be given away for free, but as the CEO of a large chunk of News Corp's media business, and supposedly being thought of as the guy at the company who "gets" new media and new media economics, it seems troubling that he so flippantly ignores the basic economics of non-excludable, non-rivalrous content, and how it can be utilized as part of a larger business model, by making other things more valuable and selling them.
So if you think about it and you're investing in things and you say 'I'm trying to figure out how to make money for this,' and then you give it away, it doesn't seem to work.
James might want to check out a little company called Google, which has done rather well giving away lots of things for free.
From there, he talks about "fair" pricing, and how they want to invest in content and price it fairly knowing that not everyone will consume it. But, of course, that's not really the issue. It's not about "fair" pricing. It's about market pricing. And if everyone else is offering market pricing and you're focused on "fair" pricing -- and your so-called "fair" pricing is above the market pricing, it's not that "not everyone" will consume it, but almost no one will consume it. And that's where you run into problems. Hell, I put a ton of work into this site. Let's say I think a "fair" price for anyone reading this site is a dollar a day. But, the market says otherwise, so my job, as someone running a business, is to figure out a way to get that money by offering something of value that can be priced not fairly, but competitively that the market will want to buy. That's what business is about. It's not about "fairness." It's about understanding the market.
Now, that said -- the point he makes following this is one I agree with wholeheartedly -- which is that if someone is not willing to pay, then it doesn't mean that it's the users' fault, but that as the content producer/copyright holder/etc. It's News Corp's job to innovate and convince people that there's something worth paying for. That's the whole basis of my "reason to buy" concept. But, the problem here is that simply designating a "fair price" when it's way above market price, is usually not a reason to buy, especially when your product is in a highly competitive and dynamic market, as is the case with news.
It's the next bit where you realize how much he's still focused on the pay TV business. He notes that, in Europe and Asia, 70% of the company's revenue is from subscriptions -- rather than advertising. He uses this to suggest that people online were so focused on reach and audience share, that they weren't focused on actually making money. Again... he's right on the facts, but wrong on where that leads him. It's true that many in the online world did not focus on making money, and that was a huge mistake. But that doesn't mean that putting up a paywall is a good strategy to make money. And that's where I think the major disconnect comes in.
He then makes the specific statement that the online news business will become like the cable business, with bundles and affiliate revenue. Here he's making the classic pay TV industry error of being so infatuated with the fees that are being passed around to carry channels, that they're hoping to recreate such a world online. But, this ignores the reason those setups have developed (limited competition and scarcity of access -- both of which don't apply in the online world) as well as the incredible frustration this has created with consumers, who are fleeing in droves (something Murdoch more or less tries to dismiss during the Q&A by saying many of the cord cutters in the US are doing so because the "deals" to get people to switch from analog to digital TV are up).
It's a bit amusing to hear him note that iPad apps for newspapers are much more cannibalistic than news websites. Again, I believe that point is absolutely true, but he seems to ignore the implicit other point he's making here: which is that web pages really weren't all that cannibalistic of newspapers.
Of course, the other funny thing is that you can see pretty clearly throughout the interview that one of his key talking points is this idea that "News Corp." isn't that big. Towards the beginning he starts to call it a big media company, but then corrects himself and says "mid-size." Later, he makes sure to note that Apple is ten times the size of News Corp., and that a company like BT is making much more money in the UK. The banker interviewing him mentions Amazon as a larger company. But that's all smoke and mirrors. News Corp. is the third largest media company in the world, only behind Disney and Time Warner, has over $30 billion in revenue and $54 billion in assets. Sorry, James, you're not a mid-sized business. You're a big, big business.
Towards the end, in response to an audience question about cord cutting and how it will impact News Corps.' business, Murdoch again brings up how they'll just make it like cable to some extent, and then falls back on the "but content is really expensive to make" line, by pointing out that, while other industries may find that things get cheaper thanks to technology, that's not true in content production. He pops out this lovely line:
There is no new technology that makes athletes not greedy.... And I think that's really something that the telco industry and a lot of the tech industry hasn't really understood -- that there's (chuckle) a whole economy behind this...
It gets a laugh, and afterwards I heard a lot of people say they agreed and it was a good point. But, I think it's a line that sounds good and masks that he's discussing two separate things. The first question is the cost of producing content. The other question is how do you make money. But those two are not the same question. No one has said that you don't make money. Saying that your business model has to change is not the same thing as saying you don't make any money. If your content is expensive to produce, then yes, of course, you need to figure out a way to have it make money, but that doesn't mean that simply charging for it is the way to do that. You can get away with charging for ancillary things (convenience being a big one), but it's important to recognize what people are really paying for, or you risk alienating them quite a bit, and driving them to alternative means of content consumption.
On the whole, I actually came out of this more impressed with Murdoch than when I went in. However, I still think that he's making some pretty serious mistakes in his assumptions, and it's going to come back to haunt him and News Corp. in the long run. The failure of the paywall for The Times is just the early warning sign.
An anonymous reader sends over a blog post from The Telegraph suggesting that the real issue for the movie industry isn't "piracy," but popcorn. The basic idea is that the theater owners drive the success of the movie industry and the theater owners make their money off of popcorn, so they only want movies that fill seats with young people who buy lots of high margin popcorn. And that leads to bad movies. Or something. Honestly, the line of thought from popcorn to movies sucking isn't entirely clear. The article does mention that box office sales are actually up (though fewer tickets are being sold), but leaves out what that really means. Of course fewer tickets are being sold: there's more competition and theaters, for the most part, have been slow to create a better experience. Rather than demanding crappy movies that they think will attract lots of young popcorn buyers, they could have (and should have) focused on making the overall movie-going experience better (which, by the way, might even include not pricing the popcorn quite so high). There are lots of reasons why some of the big movie studios are struggling, but popcorn is a pretty small part of it... as is "piracy." The failure of the movie industry and the theater industry to recognize that they're in the business of selling an overall experience is a much bigger problem, and one that the industry hasn't shown much indication of figuring out yet.
Every so often someone pulls out Cliff Stoll's infamous Newsweek piece from 1995, in which he trashes the internet and mocks the claims people make about it -- nearly all of which came true:
How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
I'm reminded of this thanks to Shocklee posting a link to it -- even though I've seen it many, many times before. The last time this article got passed around, it finally resulted in Stoll issuing a mea culpa of sorts, admitting he got it wrong. Newsweek, itself, has also sorta kinda published an apology/non-apology for the piece as well. I do wonder if the likes of Jaron Lanier and other internet pessimists will end up being forced to do the same in another fifteen years as well.
But the point of this post isn't to mock Stoll's bad predictions, but to note that this kind of thinking was hardly unique to Stoll at the time. It was, in fact, quite common -- and still is in some circles. But in rereading Stoll's article, I'm reminded of the naysayers we see around here pretty regularly, complaining about how these new business models we talk about can never work, or that they only work for the few "exceptions" at the margin.
They point out that "only" 30,000 music acts are making a living and snicker, as if that's proof that new models don't work. And, yet, in 1995, folks like Stoll could snicker at the idea of books being sold online. Later he mocks the idea that anyone would get involved in politics online, or buy an airline ticket online. That was only fifteen years ago. The internet enables amazing things, and it does so much faster than people believe, but it doesn't happen instantly. But ignoring basic trend lines and recognizing how technology progresses is only going to serve to make people look foolish down the road.
We've pointed out in the past that one of the big "myths" that supporters of old industry (i.e., gatekeeper) business models like to express is that since not everyone is a success with new business models, it's proof that those business models don't work. Except, no one has ever claimed that embracing new models means you're guaranteed to be a success. All we've said is that if you embrace the models properly you can be better off than you would be otherwise. That doesn't mean you'll make a living. It just means that it enables you to make more than you would have otherwise.
Yet, for some reason, the strawman claim lives on. Witness, for example, the glee some industry supporters are expressing at the "news" relayed by Ian Rogers of Topspin (based on data from Ian Hogarth at Songkick) that "only" between 25,000 and 30,000 musical acts are making a "living," these days. This leads to the claim that these numbers are "depressingly slim." I'm not sure I believe that. First of all, that report (by Paul Resnikoff) misstates what was said in Rogers' actual talk: that 25,000 to 30,000 acts were making a living. Resnikoff changes that to 25,000 to 30,000 "artists." Since many bands include a lot more than one artist, the actual number of artists making a living is much higher. Second, no one seems to be stating how many acts were "making a living" before. Is it more or less? On top of that, this only counts "touring bands." There are plenty of people who make their living in music outside of touring -- and this count ignores all of them.
Frankly, the 25,000 to 30,000 touring acts making a living sounds about right to me. But it's also worth noting that many of the new models are just starting to be understood, and just starting to be embraced in any serious manner (and, as such, some are making mistakes with them).
I'm reminded of the reports in the early 90s, as personal computers were becoming popular in companies, of studies that showed giving employees computers did not help company productivity. Of course, that was because many companies and employees didn't really know how to use them yet. Within a few years, no one was questioning the productivity gains allowed by computers. Watch the new business models more carefully, and watch as more people understand and adopt them, and then we'll see the old industry apologists start to run out of things to say.
It seems pointless to try to stop the practice because it's a reality of the world we live in. People will find a way. It's not a bad thing. In fact, I probably owe like 80% of my success to the fact that people can hear my music for free to see if they like it.
My approach to the question of making a living off this "work" has been to make physically attractive objects that seem worthy of purchase.
He also points out that this doesn't mean that everyone who downloads needs to buy something, but that it's their choice:
Of course there will be people who don't care about owning an object, or maybe don’t have any money, or maybe who live in Siberia, and so they can just find a way to hear it for free if they want to. I don't think there's an inherent moral duty for the listener to support the singer. In the broad historical perspective music is frivolous non-work and we are lucky to have time to make it at all. Those of us who are temporarily feeding ourselves by this activity are even luckier. The internet changed the world. Old ways need to adapt. There is a new way taking shape that no one knows yet. Trying to impose the old model of lucrative systems of parasitic labels, managers, agents, distributors, etc., on the new reality is a little blind.
It's always nice to see more musicians who seem to understand the key issues, and how to take advantage of them, rather than complain about them.
A few weeks back, we noted that book publishers apparently simply did not learn from the mistakes of the recording industry -- specifically pointing to DRM and (more importantly) the fact that they've started pricing ebooks higher than physical books. Now, in a moment of supreme irony, Copycense (who has been highlighting various ebooks priced over corresponding physical books) is noting that Steve Knopper's excellent book Appetite for Self-Destruction (subtitled "The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age") is one of those books. Indeed, Amazon shows the ebook priced at $17.99, while the paperback is $11.53 from Amazon (and available new from others at $7.50 or used at $4.42).
If you go to the ebook page itself, Amazon clearly states, "This price was set by the publisher" (a clear response to complaints about the rapidly rising price of ebooks lately). It kinda makes you wonder if the decision makers at Simon and Schuster even read the book they're pricing? They might want to crack open a used copy of the paperback (it's cheaper) to learn why not understanding digital, and therefore thinking you can price digital things super high, is not the smartest move...
This week, for our Case Study Series (check that link to see all previous case studies), we've got a fun one. Last week, we wrote about Steve Lieber, the comic artist who discovered his recent work Underground was being scanned and placed online in a 4chan forum. That story generated a ton of discussion, with some criticism, and plenty of interest in Steve's overall story. Steve agreed to do this interview, and to make it even better, his studio-mate Erika Moen, who jumped into the conversation both on 4chan and here at Techdirt joined the interview as well. Erika's perhaps most well-known for her comic DAR!. The top portion of this post will be the case study writeup, based on my conversation with both Steve and Erika, and after the jump I have the entire transcript of the interview if you'd like to see the full thing.
One of the points that we really try to get across here on Techdirt in discussing various business models and dealing with a changing marketplace is that one of the absolute key aspects is learning how to connect with fans (CwF) at a really deep level. That means a few things: it means going beyond just checking the boxes, but figuring out (a) what your fans want from you and (b) how you might deliver it, even if it may be contrary to your initial impression. And, part of that is often recognizing that when people are making unauthorized copies of your work, it's not because they're "thieves" or "immoral" or (as one of our commenters insists) "douchebags." Often, it's because they really love the work, and they want to experience it in a different way or they want to share that with others. What some people look at as "piracy," others realize is part of the way humans experience culture.
So, given that this is happening, there are all sorts of ways you can react. You can resort to the insults and name calling. You can call the lawyers and the FBI and send out angry announcements. You can call up your local elected official or pay for a lobbyist to "change the laws!" Or... you can embrace the fans, understand (1) what it is they're trying to tell you, (2) see if there's any way to provide that, and (3) use the sharing to your advantage. Now, when we posted Steve Lieber's story, one of the points that we tried to highlight in the post was that this wasn't just a case of "piracy leading to greater sales." That's similar to the whole "give it away and pray" concept. Instead, what made the Lieber story interesting was that it was clear that he engaged these fans (both old and new), and that's what drove them to want to support him and his work.
The moral of the story was not "gee, 'piracy' is good." The moral of the story was that engaging your fans in intelligent and meaningful ways, often where and how they want to engage can help you do much better than you would have otherwise. It doesn't mean "engage and you're an automatic success." It doesn't mean "engage and you'll never have to work again." It means "engage and you'll do better than you would have otherwise."
Lieber's case is a clear example of that. He admits that when he first heard about his work he had "the usual knee-jerk irritation," assuming that there was just some massive datadump of links to downloads. But when he went to 4chan, he realized it was something different:
I assumed I'd see a rapidshare link to a zip file with my book and twenty others, and someone posting a picture of a horse autopsy. Instead I arrived up at /co/ and saw a long thread in which "Internet Man," the guy who posted my book, had done so one page at a time. He had to hit "browse" and "upload" over a hundred times to post the book, and all throughout, he was talking about how great it was, nagging people to read it and discuss the story with him. That didn't feel like a pirate. That felt like a fan. And indeed, some people were starting to talk about it. So I did what I always do. I joined the conversation.
Meanwhile, his studio-mate, Erika, joined the conversation for a couple of reasons. Not only is she just interested in the whole business model issue, and loves to get involved in such discussions, she also wanted to plug Steve's book, noting that he had been "too much of a gentleman" to suggest people buy the physical book.
I actually found this part of Erika's response the most fascinating of all. Part of the reason she joined the conversation was to share and help others learn from the overall experience. It's a recognition of how a true community works, where different folks in the community help each other out:
The second time I spoke up was to explain the logic behind why someone would publish their book for no pay. If you have no experience in the comics world and are unfamiliar with how Image works, yes, that could look like a bad deal. The world of publishing is completely fascinating to me and I love to prattle on about it any chance I get. At the last Stumptown Comics Fest I even hosted and recorded a panel on self-publishing, because the more people that are informed, the more people can try it out for themselves. I never could have produced all my books and navigated being self-employed without all the help and support I received from my friends who had done it before me, so I like to pay it forward to anyone if I can.
Erika's definitely been a big believer not just in engaging with the community, but also in how "free" can be an important component of a business model, noting that DAR!, as a free comic, acts as an advertisement for the books of archives, which she can sell. She's also realized that free can create new opportunities, even in the physical world:
There is one active marketing tool that I do use at comic conventions that has really helped. I give away a free sampler of the comic in the form of a single sheet of printer paper, folded in half to be a flier containing four of my favorite strips. I spend about $40 on 500 copies and almost always run out by the end of the convention--which large portion of my sales coming from people who had never seen my comic before coming back to buy the book because they enjoyed the sampler. It has been genuinely effective. I can count on the fact that I will sell at least 100 books a con and I have no doubt the flier is the cause behind half of those sales.
While Steve has always been big into engaging with fans, he hadn't thought that much about the value of free works in combination with that engagement, but that's changing. He says that after this experience, he's definitely going to make more works downloadable and shareable. Some of his work is with the big comic shops (his next book is from DC Comics), and he doubts he'll be able to release those freely, but his own works are going to be available. Part of this experience was making the key realization that obscurity appears to be a much bigger problem than piracy:
Scans of my comics are sitting on hundreds of servers in countries I can't even spell. My stuff will be out there for free, no matter what. Ok. So now what? My goal is to tell good comics stories. I'd like people to read them in print editions, because I love print, and I think that's where I think my art looks best. Everything I've seen tells me that the people who have read my work digitally are more likely to pick it up in print than people who don't know my stuff at all.
Of course, the big question that caused a lot of discussion was how well did the comic actually sell, with some arguing that the following chart, without a scale or absolute numbers didn't tell very much:
However, the details suggest that this little engagement did quite well. Again, even if you didn't have the absolute numbers, the key point that we've been highlighting is that by engaging, you can do better than you would have otherwise, and that seems quite clear from the chart, no matter what the absolute numbers are. However, let's dig into some of the details. First, it's important to note that, while the book got tremendous reviews, it just didn't sell very well. Steve noted that both he and Jeff Parker (the author of Underground) have decently high profiles due to past and current work, but for whatever reason, Underground just didn't sell all that well when it was released. As he noted "it happens," and said that "we gave it our best shot and it was time to move on." So they had pretty much stopped thinking about Underground until all this happened.
So, once Steve (and Erika) engaged, what happened? Well, the book went from a random sale every here and there via their Etsy store, to over 150 sales in just as few days. And that's just the versions on Etsy (which contained a few different options), with the most popular being the signed book by the Jeff and Steve. The book (unsigned) is also available on Amazon, and Steve and Jeff won't know about sales there until their next monthly statement, however, there are indications that it's been selling well on Amazon as well -- and... people have just been hitting the "donate" button on the website as well:
Our Amazon rankings skyrocketed and stayed there for days. We were listed as #7 on Amazon's manga list, (a weird classification, but whatever.) And on the charts for our own publisher, Image Comics, we were the only book to crack the top ten that wasn't a volume of The Walking Dead (source of the much-hyped AMC tv series.) The donation button been insane too. Lots of $5.00 donations with requests for another book.
The key point in all of this, again, comes back to the one thing that we started this case study off with: the engagement was key. Connecting with the fans, in combination with the free work, is what made this work. Erika noted that many of the people who ordered on Etsy or who donated left notes basically saying that it was Steve's "totally awesome" participation in the community that drove them to willingly (happily) give him their money. She also notes that Steve didn't just join in the conversation, but he really got involved. As she noted she saw him go in there "out-niceing and out-classing everyone, even the people trying to troll him." That seems to have worked wonders...
Thanks to Steve and Erika for taking the time, and if you'd like to learn more about them, here's Steve's website and his Twitter account. Here's Erika's website and her Twitter account. And, of course, here are the links to the works they discussed, Underground and DAR!, where you can find out all you need to know about their works and ways to support both Steve and Erika.
The full transcript of the interview is after the jump for those who want to read it...
