Monetary Value vs. Hippie Value
Okay, the truth is, that title is a little bit tongue-in-cheek and you’ll see why in a minute. On Twitter, I was directed to the following article at Tech Dirt: The Difference Between Price and Value.
I really don’t understand WHY people do this, but nevertheless some people really really like to shift an argument outside the scope of what was even being discussed. When this happens often it’s worded so eloquently that the person being lambasted with it finds themselves nodding in agreement before they can stop to really think about the fact that the other party just took them down a completely unrelated side-road. (Yes, I’ve done it too.)
When people are talking about price and value, they are speaking about MONETARY VALUE. No one is talking about love and sunshine and respect and other value systems. Those things are all nice and good but love and sunshine won’t pay your bills. Money is important. We only say “money isn’t important” to make people without it feel better. But that mantra is not rooted in reality.
Money is very important because we live in a money-based society and that’s the shit you need to pay for stuff: Bills, food, shelter, clothing, charitable contributions, electricity, health care, transportation, etc. The only way you will get away from this is to go live in a commune or out in the wilderness somewhere where you are completely self-sufficient.
Now I realize no one is saying money isn’t important and believe me I’m not trying to shift the argument after I just bitched about that very thing, but what I’m saying is… monetary value shouldn’t be fluffed off. It’s important. Artists should be paid for their work. And with many things digital, it’s very dangerous to give everything away because you then devalue that work in the marketplace.
When I say you devalue that work I’m not saying people find it less worthy or less meaningful, I’m saying when someone isn’t willing to pay money for it, it has no monetary value, and if you train them to expect everything for free, then that is exactly what will happen.
Monetary value is determined by what people are willing to pay. If someone is willing to pay $5 for something, that is its monetary value. If people are willing to pay $50, that is its monetary value. Monetary value differs from person to person. There are some items that some people are willing to pay $5 for while others are willing to pay $50 for it. If you have this situation you’re usually better off targeting the higher-paying customer because they tend to be less whiny. I don’t know why this is, but the less a customer has to pay for something the more likely they are to bitch to you about it. I’ve experienced this phenomenon in other businesses I’ve run. The cheaper your product or services the larger sense of entitlement your customer is likely to have about it.
So when talking about price and value, yes, the two are absolutely imperative to each other. Because price is typically determined by what the market will bear and what people are willing to spend. While I would love to write things that move people and have intrinsic value beyond just money, I wouldn’t be putting it out into the market place if I wasn’t interested in money and monetary value.
If monetary value is too gauche for your work, then don’t sell it. But don’t act like those who won’t give everything away for free are somehow wrong or foolish and don’t understand value.
This is a fascinating debate. I’ve been an advocate of the “freemium” model for the best part of a year now. My experience has been almost the opposite of what you describe. Sure, there are some loudmouths out therewho want everyone to give everything for free, but I’ve encountered many more (I guess I would – we always encounter a higher proportion of those who disagree with us than those who agree, don’t we?) who question my right to give my work away for free as though I am trying to hound them out of business. I AM trying to hound me INTO business, but not at anyone’s expense – i just want the right to remove readers’ barriers to looking through my work – and the fact I’m an unknown is one, and charging money as an unknown would be a biggie. Once they’re looking at my work, I’m happy for it to stand or fall onmerit.
The point of the freemium model, with something given away free, and something ELSE charged for is that it doesn’t monetarily devalue my novel. It monetarily devalues, in my case, the ebook of my novel. But it values UP coming to see me perform, or buying a special edition of the novel. I think we need more nuance in the argument about free – exactly WHAT is the thing that has value for a writer like me? Is it the epub of my book? The paperback? The special ed? The zine? The live shows? The T-shirts? Or is it the whole package? Or is it, in fact, my whole career? The point is, I thik the public IS more nuanced than we give them credit for. I don’t think that giving a file away for free makes them see the novel as worth less. It may make them see the file as worth less, sure – but the novel is more than the file.
Dan
Hehe, hi Dan, welcome to my blog! Well I definitely don’t think someone else giving something away for free hurts me. I will rise or fall on my own merits and marketing savvy. Not threatened by others like that.
But I will say I *am* an advocate of free. And I guess reading that one post out of context you might not know that. I have an entire novella I give away for free, I’ll have free excerpts, and I’ll be podcasting all the fiction, again for free. In addition there will be times when I run “limited time only get this ebook for free” sort of deals. I absolutely understand the power of free.
However, my only beef with that, is when people are so extreme they feel EVERY digital version of everything they do should be free all the time indefinitely so they can drive print sales.
I understand it works out well for Cory Doctorow. But what happens if/when ebooks are the primary delivery system and you HAVE to monetize that format? What then? That’s my only issue. (And not every author wants to create T-shirts. And not every author is T-shirtable in the first place even if they want to. How many people wear T-shirts with just random book titles on them? Not a lot.)
I think free has it’s place and every artist/creator needs to be giving something away. It builds trust and goodwill with your listeners/viewers/readers/whatever. I just think there is definitely a point of diminishing returns, and a point where you set yourself up for future problems if you give too much. There comes a point where you have to put a price on things, IMO. That is if you want to be a part of the marketplace and not just a hobbyist.
And not saying you’re not. You very well may be making money hand over fist based on whatever free model you’re using and if so, that’s great. I just would hope that you aren’t cutting off your options to charge your readers for digital later by cashing in on the driving of print sales today.
Also when I’m talking about monetarily devaluing the work, I’m talking about that particular format. If something is free indefinitely in ebook, you’ll meet with more buyer resistance if you want to charge for it later. It will have lost it’s perceived monetary value. Not necessarily the same for the print version.
But at the same time if the difference in the ebook and the print book is only that the print book has paper, in some way you are training readers to think it’s the manufacturing that is of monetary value and not the story or information.
Does it have intrinsic value beyond the money? As writers we sure hope so! But that doesn’t change what you do to the monetary value of your work if you’ve been giving it all away in the format that doesn’t have extra manufacturing costs.
A fantastic and well written article. I have some reactions but would like to add them at a later time as I’m under deadline right now. However, I’d like to just say how thankful I am that someone has written out their arguments so thoughtfully. Brilliant!
“I understand it works out well for Cory Doctorow. But what happens if/when ebooks are the primary delivery system and you HAVE to monetize that format? What then? That’s my only issue.”
I don’t think that this will ever be the case, so your issue is frankly a matter of misunderstanding the model. This meme of novelists selling t-shirts is not an accurate indication, or even metaphor, for what is happening.
Readers cannot just take direct possession of the text with no mediating factors at all, even in a completely free and/or lawless situation. My moral qualms about downloading movies and music are absolutely zero, but I still regularly buy each from iTunes, because I’m willing to pay for quality, convenience, presentation, reliability, and other contextual qualities. The artists themselves do not have to provide me with any of these services for me to want to spend money to take possession of their work. The services are provided by the platform that delivers the content to me. For those platforms to be seen as truly reliable and accessible at scale, they need to be legal, with terms of use to which they, as well as their users, are subject. And for them to be legal, they need to license the content from the artists.
This whole debate is a bit silly. The change will happen, like it or not, and those content creators who didn’t understand it will eventually relax when they realize that they are still getting paid.
Thank you Ross! I don’t mind debate and having different viewpoints. I just worry about doing it too much on Twitter since my understanding of Twitter is that it’s meant to be a more fun social networking thing and when we debate there, we force all our followers either to watch us argue, or skim our posts, or unfollow us. And none of those options seems very productive to me from a platform-building standpoint.
miconian,
It may not be clear from the context of this one post, but I absolutely believe in “freemium” I just don’t believe in “free extremium” lol. I have a free ebook, I will have free excerpts, and I will have free podcasts.
I am not worried that much about “piracy.” But giving something away and it being stolen are two different things. Ideally most people should feel at least a little guilty when they steal someone else’s work without paying for it. But when you give it away, what motivation does someone have for paying for it? If you give me a free digital copy of your book, I’m not going to go buy a digital copy of the same book. And neither will most people.
I have no problem with the concepts of free, but I think when taken to an extreme it sets up a situation where you cannot charge for your work in digital format.
And for those who are giving away PDFs but selling other e-formats, that won’t work for long either, as most e-readers coming out are cross-platform and at the VERY least read PDFs. So if you charge for it over here, but give it away over there, you’ll piss off a sizable chunk of your audience, as well as run into issues with some of your distributors.
My view is not that print will die, but that it will eventually become a subsidiary right much like audio and E will be the format that has the most money in it. IMO. Now in ten years we can see if I’m right or not. But you will not be able to simultaneously give away all your ebooks AND sell them. You have to pick one or the other. And if you’ve been giving it all away, then readers will resent (at least a good portion of them will) having the free rug pulled out from under them, whether that’s a logical feeling on their part or not.
Now I will *always* try to have a free podcast of all my work. Why? Because audio isn’t a threat. Audio will always be a subsidiary right and will never become the primary delivery method.
There’s an interesting post over at booksquare about “enhanced e-books.” Basically, these will be e-books with special features. In my view, one clear way for this to go is that the PDF (or similar) will be released for free, or very cheap, and then readers will be asked to pay for the enhanced version.
But there are many other models… I should just do a blog post on this myself…
I still believe the STORY itself or the INFORMATION itself is WORTH money. (Sorry for all those caps, just emphasizing words, not yelling at you.)
Your mileage and choices may vary and it’s fine if they do. But as for me I will not just sell people “extra features” or “add-ons” or “swag” or “scarce goods” or some other “thing ” or “extra service,” because my stories are worth paying money for, FOR the stories themselves. I give enough free so people know if they want it or not, but beyond that, they will need to purchase it.
I’m in the business of selling stories, not doing twice the amount of work i should be doing for a culture that feels it’s entitled to free. And I don’t believe the situation is in any way improved when “to avoid being stolen from” people just give it away. As I said in Twitter that’s like screwing everybody you meet to avoid the chance of rape.
In the model I’m talking about (which I believe will come to pass before long), you, the original and central creator, will still get paid to tell the story, and, if you like, nothing else. The payment will come from the publisher (of one kind or another), who will then give your book away for free, and earn the money back on the supplementary materials, or the platform, or maybe they’ll only give away the first half, or maybe they’ll give away the whole thing, but only on Tuesdays. There will be different models, but you as the author, especially as an already-established author, will have options in terms of who you want to work with. But ultimately, the merchandising and packaging will not be the writer’s problem.
Will and Ross might differ with me here. I am not a believer in this “writers of the future will have to work twice as hard” thing. I mean, sure, many small-time writers build up small followings with Twitter and blogs and so on, with the idea of eventually becoming big enough draws to monetize their content one way or another. But ultimately, I don’t think this is much different from the situation that any unpublished (in print) writer faces; she must find a way to either persuade someone who controls a podium to let her have it; or she must create her own podium and eventually show the size of her following as proof that she deserves an even bigger podium. In many ways, I think that the online world actually gives writers more opportunities than it did before; it actually makes their job easier, because no longer is their ability to communicate to their audience efficiently subject to the whim of an elite few.
Yes, people are buying fewer books. And yes, that is happening partly because they are consuming a lot of free content online. But the situation is not as simple as it seems, and it’s all still very much in flux.
That’s an intriguing idea however… I’m not sure many mainstream publishers are willing to enact it. Judging from how resistant they are to all change.
Also it won’t work for me personally because I’m an indie author. I’m not self-publishing to garner the attention of a trad publisher. If I ever succeeded wildly on my own and a trad publisher wanted to throw an obscene amount of money at me and give me a real shot at the NYT list, then of course I’d be stupid not to consider that, but barring “That” wild long shot, I have no intention of EVER having a traditional publisher. Indie isn’t a “means to an end” for me. I LIKE publishing.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying though, and also I totally agree that this is a GREAT period of opportunity for writers!
I like it too, but I wouldn’t mind so terribly much if someone offered to do a print run. Would you really turn down Tor if they offered you an advance for the sequel to Kept?
Or are you more like an old fashioned magic-user, who would rather just take in a local therein?
Yes, I would turn down a publisher. I’m “doing” a print release. Blood Lust comes out in both print and E this Spring. The next book, Save My Soul I’m planning to release at the end of the year (cause it’s already been through a few drafts of edits, though I may hold off on release to make my releases an even year apart and give me time to get the third book rolling.)
haha and throwing my fiction back at me are you now?
Though actually I think what I’m doing is both old AND new. This is the traditional way authors published before commercial publishing houses, and this is how they are turning and starting to publish again, many of them.
But yes, I would turn down a publisher. I had an agent email me to ask me if I’d like to receive a call to talk about possible representation, and I basically said no. Being an indie author is really important to me. Being in control of my own projects is really important to me. I WOULD sell foreign rights as soon as that becomes feasible because it doesn’t hamper what I’m doing here, but I will likely need a certain level of success domestically before I can do that.
Of course I think that agent thought I was on acid, because she never emailed me back to let me know how much I needed to sell before I could sell foreign rights. Maybe I got caught in her spam filter. Or maybe she thought I was on acid. Or maybe she didn’t believe in me as much as *I* believe in me. And the last thing in the world I need is an agent who doesn’t believe in me as much as I believe in me.
Or the email was from her assistant, who wrote to 50 people, and just only has the bandwidth to correspond with those who express interest. Or a hundred other scenarios.
Anyway, I respect your desire to be independent. Maybe you’ll want to run an excerpt on Revolving Floor sometime to help promote your next book.
I doubt it was her assistant. It was a major agency but it was an agent just starting to build her own list. I would think someone would want to deal with that stuff on their own. LOL @ only has the bandwidth to correspond with those who express interest.
I’ll look into that.
Are you involved in Revolving Floor?
Yeah, I kind of run it.
Yeah I’m definitely interested. BL comes out this Spring, so send me a message on my contact form and let me know what you need from me.
Thanks!
Worth mentioning… I’m not a big fan of the iPad so far, but I think the main purpose of the device is to deal with exactly what we’re talking about here….it’s a content platform. People get used to the device, used to the features, the font size changes, the bookstore that comes with it, etc., and when they end up finding your book on it, it just becomes easier for them to go ahead and buy it.
That’s very true. When I saw the video for that tonight I was thinking: “Okay I have to get my book in the ibook store.”
And you know that could be a key thing with piracy. I mean when you’ve got THAT kind of built-in convenience… if the price is right are you going to mess with torrents and risk corrupted files/viruses or are you going to make the impulse purchase right then and there for instant gratification? I’m betting the latter.
‘Price by Value’ is basically redistribution of wealth from ‘the many’ (society at large) to (usually) a smaller group (corporation or person). ‘Price by Cost’ is essentially receiving a product/service for the additive ‘cost’ of just its parts and labor. Too many people haven’t figured this out and are surprised when the rich get richer and poor get poorer.
There are many reasons the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I think that’s one of them probably, but not the only one, IMO.