Cory Doctorow Quotes on Money & Wealth (3 Quotes)

is it any different to loaning a book to someone There was a book in the US ( Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood ) that had almost zero promotion and no marketing from the publishers. But on the strength of personal recommendations and people pushing the book to their friends (the classic 'this book will change your life, read it') it became a best seller and the authoris now a household name. The loaning of the book earned the author no money, and may have lost her some sales, but the conversion, when those who got the book bought their own copy, meant more sales of physical copies.

Finally, in the short term it's really obvious. People need to hear about my book, and if they've found out about it and buy it, I make money. The net cost of eBook distribution from my website is approaching zero. With half a million downloads of Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom , it doesn't matter if my conversion rate is a tiny percentage, it's still doing incredibly well in physical sales. The first print run of 10,000 was sold out in months, and so was the second print run. The hardcover was twice the size of a normal run, and it's on it's second run as we speak. The numbers are modest on the scale of the Internet, but that gives you an idea of what the stakes are in science fiction publication. To raise the stakes, you need to go outside the traditional realm. If I rely on just the bookstore sales, I won't make a living. Putting it online does not put my livelihood at risk, you make a living finding new ways to do business.

If I am going to be a writer, earning a living in the era of digital text, I need to understand where the opportunities are. They won't disappear, they'll just be different, and need to be recognised. In the last days of Vaudeville Theatre, they sued Marconi because radio was killing Vaudeville, where you had to pay to go into a relatively small room to listen to music and voice. But it didn't kill music, the outcome was a thousand times more music, making a thousand times more money, reaching a thousand times more people. But in the short term, there was panic. If digital text will result in hundreds more authors, with hundreds more novels, I need to be in the middle of eBooks. I need to be heavily engaged. All those people downloading my text is good news.