I’m at it because I want to fill my bathtub with money and rub my hands and laugh and laugh and laugh.Ī large chunk of “ebook piracy” (downloading unauthorized ebooks from the net) is undertaken by people in the developing world, where the per-capita GDP can be less than a dollar a day. Not because I’m some patchouli-scented, fuzzy-headed, “information wants to be free” info-hippie. So there you have it: I’m giving these books away to sell more books, to find out more about the market and to increase my profile so that I can land speaking and columnist gigs. And giving away books increases your notoriety a whole lot more than clutching them to your breast and damning the pirates. The more people there are that have read and enjoyed my work, the more of these gigs I’ll get. My chances of landing speaking gigs, columns, paid assignments, and the rest of it are all contingent on my public profile. I’m an sf writer: it’s my job to love the future. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. No, it’s not “fair” that novelists who are good speakers will have a better deal than novelists who aren’t, but neither was it fair that the era of radio gave a boost to the career of artists who played well in the studios, nor that the age of downloading is giving a boost to the careers of artists who play well live. When that happens, writerly income will come from incidental sources such as paid speaking engagements and commissioned articles.
There may well be a time between the sunset of printed text and the appearance of robust models for unfettered distribution of electronic text, an interregnum during which the fortunes of novelists follow those of poets and playwrights and other ink-stained scribblers whose industries have cratered beneath them.
Some other writers have decided that their readers are thieves and pirates, and they devote countless hours to systematically alienating their customers. I’m an entrepreneur and I live and die by market intel. Email me with that precious market-intelligence about what electronic text is for, so that I can be the first writer to figure out what the next writerly business model is. Imagine new things that books are for, and do them.
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When you download my book, please: do weird and cool stuff with it. But most importantly, it delivers the very best market-intelligence that I can get. Giving away books costs me nothing, and actually makes me money. The artists who demanded that radio just stop went broke, ended up driving taxis, and were forgotten by history. It was inconceivably weird, and yet it made the artists who embraced it rich as hell. Those people just could not imagine a future in which audiences and playlists were statistically sampled by a special “collection society” created by a Congressional anti-trust “consent decree,” said society to hand out money collected from radio stations (who collected from soap manufacturers and other advertisers), to compensate artists. In fact, I believe that it’s probably too weird for us to even imagine today, as the idea of today’s radio marketplace was incomprehensible to the Vaudeville artists who accused the radio station owners of mass piracy for playing music on the air. No, the business and social practice of ebooks will be way, way weirder than that. If you believe this sort of thing, you have no business writing sf, and you probably shouldn’t be reading it either. That’s like believing that your mobile phone will be the same thing as the phone attached to your wall, except in your pocket.
Now, if you’ve got a poor imagination, you might think that we’ll enter that era with special purpose “ebook readers” that simulate the experience of carrying around “real” books, only digital. You don’t need to be a science fiction writer to see the writing on the wall (or screen, as the case may be). We’re already reading more words off of more screens every day and fewer words off of fewer pages every day. Some day, though, paper books will all but go away.
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