Jeremiah Tolbert

The inter­net is the most dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy to the cre­ative arts since man first put paint on cave walls.  Everything about pub­lish­ing is chang­ing.  Cases in point:

Konrath EBooks Sales Top 100K

Joe Konrath isn’t a writer who I was famil­iar with until today, but he’s see­ing some amaz­ing suc­cess going against tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing meth­ods. Joe’s mak­ing more money on his own with ebook sales than he makes from any of his books with tra­di­tional publishers. 

Why are my self-​​pubbed ebooks earn­ing more than Whiskey Sour, which remains my best­selling print title with over 80,000 books sold in var­i­ous formats?

Because Hyperion has priced Whiskey Sour at $4.69 on Amazon, and I price my ebooks at $2.99.

For each $4.69 ebook they sell, I earn $1.17.

For each $2.99 ebook I sell, I earn $2.04.
So I’m basi­cally los­ing money hand over fist because Hyperion is pric­ing my ebooks too high, and giv­ing me too low a roy­alty rate.

Even the print sales (Whiskey Sour just went into a fifth print­ing) don’t come close to mak­ing up the money I’m losing.

If we assume I could sell 833 copies per month of Whiskey Sour, I’d be earn­ing $17,000 per year on it, rather than $5616 per year. (I’m guess­ing my num­bers have gone up recently, and am esti­mat­ing 400 Whiskey Sour sales per month.)

Let’s mul­ti­ply that times the six books Hyperion controls.

I’m esti­mat­ing I cur­rently earn $33,696 annu­ally in ebook roy­al­ties on those six.
If I had the rights, I esti­mate I’d earn $102,000.

Do I want my books to go out of print?

Hell yeah.

We’re see­ing a gold mine rush in ebook pub­lish­ing right now, and I don’t think it’s any­where near peaked, as Konrath points out.   I pre­dict as peo­ple look at his hard num­bers, we’re going to see a lot of promi­nent writ­ers rethink­ing their atti­tudes about self-​​publishing.  We’re going to see ebook rights play­ing a much larger role in nego­ti­a­tions.  Successful writ­ers who own their own ebook rights are going to find that pub­lish­ers are going to play hard in try­ing to acquire them—it would not sur­prise me if authors are being told they won’t sell new works unless they sell off the ebook rights to older books.  Publishers have got to be look­ing at this whole sit­u­a­tion and rethink­ing their game.  I know authors are.

The world is chang­ing.  The world has changed so much from 8 years ago when I started writ­ing.  And it’s still moving.

And what’s more, this kind of “set out on your own and make a liv­ing at what you love” suc­cess story isn’t lim­ited to pub­lish­ing fic­tion.  Indie video game devel­op­ers are see­ing the same thing.

$250,000-a-day Minecraft striks indie game gold

Minecraft.  I’ve lost at least one week­end to the game.  It’s in alpha.  Costs about $12.  Has graph­ics that are about on par with Nintendo 64.  But it’s addic­tive. Oh god, is it.  Mix a lit­tle action adven­ture with the sand­box plea­sure of build­ing stuff with lego blocks, and you kind of get at the cen­tral play model.

Basically, you start Minecraft and you have an entire world in front of you, pop­u­lated with a few ani­mals, trees, and hills.  There’s some water and sand too.  You’re kind of at a loss at what to do first.  You punch stuff, and soon you find that trees break apart into logs which you pick up and add to your inven­tory.  You look in your inven­tory and you find a 2x2 craft­ing matrix.  Throw a cou­ple of piles of logs in there and you can make sticks.

Do you see where this is going?

Sticks turn into basic tools. Tools like you get new mate­ri­als like stone, and even­tu­ally met­als when you dig deep enough.

Problem is, when the sun sets, mon­sters come out, and you don’t stand a chance against them with your fists and sticks.  So you need to build a shel­ter to pro­tect your­self, and you need light, so you make torches.

This Penny Arcade comic cap­tures the essence of the expe­ri­ence pretty damned well.

And it’s only in Alpha.  It’s amaz­ingly addic­tive as it is—who knows what fea­tures the devel­oper, Notch, is plan­ning on adding to the game. 

Minus some Paypal fees, the money Notch is mak­ing on this game is pretty much pure profit.  And recently, he made $250,000 in one day sell­ing copies of an unfin­ished game that has no tra­di­tional pub­lisher, with what I sus­pect is a near-​​zero mar­ket­ing bud­get.  The game’s got­ten plenty of word of mouth, but that’s about it.  Now, Notch is hir­ing staff and build­ing his own game studio.

Do you see the pat­tern here? I know I do.  Creative folks are wak­ing up in a world where we don’t need per­mis­sion from any­one else to chase our dreams.  The prob­lem is still going to be one of qual­ity, and con­quer­ing obscu­rity, but bar­ri­ers between artist and audi­ence are absolutely, with­out a doubt, crum­bling.  You can argue whether this is a good or a bad thing, but I don’t think you can dis­pute this.  Twitter, blog­ging, and all of it.

There’s still going to be a role for cura­tors.  I think that aspect of pub­lish­ing still has value.  At least at first.  But once you’ve estab­lished an audience…?   

There’s an awful lot to think about these days.  I know one thing’s for sure—I’m start­ing to recon­sider my posi­tion on not cre­at­ing ebook files.