Rediscovering Archaic Words (freemium)

This is a post over here. Please feel free to discuss in either place :)

Looking for free-to-paid and free-to-volume interfaces is a reactive and restrictive strategy. You are limiting yourself to what has worked and what has been shown to work and closing yourself off to things that might turn out to work very well. If you believe in free, look for ways to be free, and see where they lead. Be proactive. Following established models is great. And I wouldn’t advocate making exceptions your primary strategy. But don’t be closed, be open. There are lots of ways to be free. If you think free works, seek them out. Make your proposition not “My books free, how can I tell people and how can I monetize it?” but “How can I give my work away?”

20 months ago I wrote a piece for the fabulous Guy Gonzalez about the freemium debate in the writing world. Freemium was a buzzword in the wake of the publication of Chris Anderson's Free. He and Malcolm Gladwell were at each other's throats. Smashwords was new. Kindle was barely taking its first steps. Everyone wanted to know how FREE would change publishing forever (trawl the early posts of my old blog!).

Now, you rarely hear people talking about Chris Anderson (not even The Long Tail - see my previous post on The Large Middle). Or Kevin Kelly, whose 1000 True Fans is still the single most important article for any would-be self-publisher.

[caption id="attachment_326" align="aligncenter" width="201" caption="download my bestselling The Company of Fellows. It's just 70p"][/caption]

There's a good reason for that. We have genuine success models. We have Amanda Hocking and John Locke (we also have the same white elephants we always had - the likes of Konrath and Leather: as established figures, they as irrelevant as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails). They made their name through Kindle. Not Smashwords. Not even really Scribd. They made their way, in other words, not by being free but by being cheap. AND they made their way not by building a following of 1000 fans each willing to pay a lot, but by selling lots of very cheap books to a gazillion people.

So, are Kelly and Anderson irrelevant now? Does free have a role in a writer's plans?

[caption id="attachment_325" align="aligncenter" width="144" caption="Download my adult full-length poem SKIN BOOK. It's FREE"][/caption]

I want to make some points. Debate can follow later, along with rabble-rousing (I feel the need to get more opinionated again. Endless diplomacy sits ill!), so for now just a few points:

• freemium is essentially about this question: how do you monetise free? In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely makes a strong case that there is a qualitative psychological difference between free and cheap. I'm not overly interested in how readers *value* books in a moral sense (that's a red herring that's used to beat people with the guilty stick), but it does mean that monetising free may be considerably harder than monetising cheap - Amanda Hocking's $0.99 intro to a $2.99 range is savvier than using free in the hope of gaining paid.


• If freemium is going to work, I think we need to look at both high volume and high price for the ultimate paid product. If there is a qualitative jump between $0 and $0.01 then if there is a place for free, it might as well be for introducing people to a $9.99 product or a $99 one as a $0.99 one. Whilst using low pricing will not work as an introduction to much higher multiples.


• At the moment most indie writers who make it are doing so through Kindle. They don't get to offer their books free on Kindle - at least, they can't wake up and say "today my book will be free" as they can on Smashwords. This may be skewing our view of the value of free. Publishers haven't had much luck taking on indies with marketing dollars. They are beginning to leverage free on Kindle. That's a space really worth watching.


• People may not read free books, but that may be irrelevant. What free can do is use volume downloads to inject a book into a distributor's search and recommendation algorithms. When they begin to charge that can be worth as much as word of mouth from the free downloaders. It ensures a minimum mass of paid readers who can then seed word of mouth recommendation if the book is up to scratch.


• Free is not just about freemium. For some writers (with my performance pieces and some of my other work, me included) being paid is not only not the ultimate goal, it's not any goal. The goal is bringing your work to an audience who otherwise wouldn't have access. Free may not be sufficient to do that. It may still be the best policy to work free as though you were going to monetize - and then not go the final step. So, advertising on the Kindle forums and Kindleboards as well as publishing to Smashwords, targeting Nook, where you can choose to make your work free


• loyal fans remain the key to long-term security. If you use freemium or if you use cheamium, the aim is not to sell lots of copies of this one book, it's to sell enough in the long term to make a living. My inkling is there's an algorithm linking fanbase to price and longevity (people who are fans of your work at x price will be y in number and will remain loyal for z years). Finding this balance will vary genre to genre, and is our quest for the philosopher's stone.


• Think of free as the first step to more than monetisation or volume. I'm going to bold the next bit because I have a feeling it's key. Looking for free-to-paid and free-to-volume interfaces is a reactive and restrictive strategy. You are limiting yourself to what has worked and what has been shown to work and closing yourself off to things that might turn out to work very well. If you believe in free, look for ways to be free, and see where they lead. Be proactive. Following established models is great. And I wouldn't advocate making exceptions your primary strategy. But don't be closed, be open. There are lots of ways to be free. If you think free works, seek them out. Make your proposition not "My books free, how can I tell people and how can I monetize it?" but "How can I give my work away?"
  
  [caption id="attachment_327" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="If you like my books you'll love this novel. It's just £2.14"][/caption]

At the time of writing my book The Company of Fellows is #125 overall paid for Kindle UK at 70p There is a lot of my work available for free on the web. Try Year Zero Writers and its Dan Holloway tag for almost all my shorts and poems for free.

The Large Middle

I've been writing a lot for other blogs the last few weeks, so I thought it might be an idea in these cases to act as a sort of aggregation site so people can have a read, but can do so on the actual site, and with any luck discover some amazing new sites as a result.

First off, I wrote a piece called "The Large Middle" for Words With Jam, a fantastic writers' magazine for which I write a column on social media and live reading. The piece argues that the real winners in the epublishing revolution are midlst authors.

Here's a sample:

"There are two reasons why literary midlisters were Kindle pioneers – they have a natural inclination to the new, and they of all groups they had the strongest disaffection with the old industry. So they were the first to head for the new frontier...
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

Read Words With Jam Magazine here

You get ZERO for FREE

All three of the first Year Zero Writers novels - Benny Platonov, Glimpses of a Floating World, and Songs from the Other Side of the Wall - are now available as ebooks for free.

I want to take a moment to explain why. Inevitably this will mean rehashing some arguments I've made on this blog, and on others. So if you've heard it all before, please bear with me. Because I want to give a list of reasons and starting points for conversation, I won't be going into too much detail. Not because there isn't any, but because that would make the post way too long.

So, why decide to make our work free? (In electronic format - you can, of course, still buy the paperbacks) Of cousre, these reasons don't just apply to us - go forth and make your books free.

Here's my Free Manifesto:


1. People want content to be free. They expect content to be free. As hardware tech advances and people fall in love with it, the hunger for free content grows. I'm going to call this phenomenon FREED. And FREED IS GOOD. It's a wave the new writer can ride.

2. For a new writer, the choice isn't between giving your book away and having people pay for it. It's between giving your book away (and maybe getting some readers), and having no one read your book. Why should someone pay money for a book by someone they don't know? The answer is they won't. Let them get to know you.

3. File-sharing is a fact of life. Embrace it as a way to get your book read. Make it easy for people to do. It's NOT true they'll file share YOUR book anyway if you protect it. More's the pity. They won't. They'll ignore it and file-share Dan Brown/Stephanie Meyer instead.

4. Free does not devalue something. The value of culture isn't in what you pay for it. More importantly, it's not even PERCEIVED to be in what you pay for it. What we value most is what we have a personla and emotional connection to. If you're an author, it's THAT you should be trying to reproduce and not a sense fo "having paid for something". That's what I mean when I encourage writers 1. to engage their readers and 2. to try and recreate the festival spirit. Soem people call it "adding value". Yes, increased money is a result, but that's not the aim - the aim is to "add attachment".

5. Freemium goes with 1,000 true fans like hand in a tight, sheer, silky glove. Jargon apologies. Freemium is the term coined, I believe, by Chris "Long Tail" Anderson to describe the business model by which you give something away for free in one format, with the intention of selling it n another (paperbacks etc).1,000 true fans is Kevin Kelly's idea that to make a living from your creativity you only actually need 1,000 true fans who will pay for your work. Clearly these two ideas marry up nicely. If you give your work away for free, not everyone who takes it will aslo pay. But you don't need them to. If you've got a great product, and back it up with direct engagement with your readers through your blog, book tours, other events, you will build a following of true fans who WILL pay - for the paperback - and more.

6. Free helps us sever the link once and for all between culture and money. At a time when increasing internet access starts to outstrip access to banking, this is, on a global social level, essential. As creatives from all over the world acn put their work out there, and consumers seek to remunerate them, if we rely on the old equation of value and money, the only model available will be to go through third party conversion agents. We will see the developing world's creativity raped for profit in the exact same way as happened to its natural resources centuries ago. We need a new way fo turning the desire to reward into benefit for the producer; and whilst money plays part of that role, it can't be the only part.

7. The big one (and the one most likely to change in coming years) is timing. I won't claim ebooks are THE future. I don't think they are. Not in their current form (the future is intelligent paper). BUT they are about to undergo a mini explosion. As are sites where readers find and promote content they love. The effect of that is simple - if your material's out there now, as the medium grows, the effect of your presence early in the game will be multiplied. I've paid serious attention to the Indie ebook market for about 3 weeks. And I can already tell you who the "players" are, and there aren't many. The chances of great content being discovered and creating a buzz is still high. BUT ONLY IF IT'S THERE and ONLY IF IT'S FREE. And out of that soup, a whole new landscape will emerge. As with satellite TV and internet provision, it's at the start of the tipping point that it's most important to focus solely on market share. And that's where we are now. Now is the time to stake your claim.

Just How Free is Free?

So what have we learned this month? Seth Godin thinks free is good; Chris Anderson thinks free’s good as long as free’s actually freemium; Malcolm Gladwell thinks free doesn’t work; anyone without an agent thinks free’s the cure for everything from cancer to climate change; and a whole host of frightened writers with an agent thinks the devil’s put a lot of idle wannabes’ hands to work and come up with free.

But isn’t every single one of them actually missing the point? Free isn’t free at all. Free’s a privilege a small minority of already lucky people have bought at the expense of everyone else.

The problem is this, and funnily enough, it originates from the camp in which I’ve well and truly planted myself. The freevolutionaries would have us believe the internet has revolutionised a writer’s access to the marketplace, and the consumer’s access to all and every form of writing that exists outside the mainstream. Free is empowering – it means anyone’s work can be read by anyone. The cream will rise; bottom-up self-forming groups of devoted fans will create trusted portals of true excellence where the world’s readers can find the very best of the kind of stuff they like; the pie of culture consumers’ money will be able to be sliced up amongst everyone, by everyone.

For the freevolutionaries, in other words, free is a matter of enfranchisement. What they’re waving the flag for is universal cultural suffrage. Which is not only revolutionary. It’s fantastic.

Only it’s not. It’s not only not true, it’s a dangerous, dangerous idea. Which is why my beef’s not really with those fighting the freerguard of stuckism. They think free is dangerous too. And what’s more they’re so obviously wrong I’m happy to let them carry on talking to themselves whilst the rest of us have a debate that matters.

The reason it’s dangerous to see posting your material for free on the internet as universally enfranchising is this. Suppose we win that battle, get others to see that yes, there’s not only a kind of moral imperative to empower producers and consumers, to pay by merit, and to acknowledge that culture belongs to the people not an elite; but there’s also a pretty hot business case for ditching any form of protectionism in our approach to free. Suppose we do all that, then the war’s won. We’ve handed cultural power back to the producers of culture, where it belongs.

Only it’s not, and we haven’t. In many ways, we’ve created a worse situation than the one we’re in today. And we’ve convinced ourselves it’s not a problem at all. By focusing the battle for cultural access (for producers and consumers) we’ve ignored the billions who’ve never seen, or even heard of, a computer. We’ve defined them out of the cultural conversation altogether. By creating the illusion of universal access to the market, and a more meritocratic system of market-driven reward for producers of culture, we’ve enforced rather than deconstructed the idea that culture comes from and belongs to the privileged.

And even worse. What of those on the periphery. What of the Sao Paolo poet who has brief and intermittent access to the one computer in the shanty. He can post his work for the world to see. He can be picked up by trusted cultural portals and brought to the attention of millions. He does have access to the market. Problem solved. Great. Only…how does the market, that thinks he’s great and thinks he should have a slice of the pie, actually pay him? No, really? Into which Paypal account do they put their $9.99? How does he use the money they’re willing to pay to get the goods he needs to buy?

So free’s bad then? No. Free’s good. Free is great. Free is empowering and enfranchising, but it’s not a final answer. It has to be part of a strategy that seeks to make cultural access truly global, and access to the market truly universal. Free is part of a much wider nexus of moral and practical imperatives designed to remove more slices of the pie from privileged hands and put them where they truly belong. The cultural question won’t be answered until the poet of Sao Paolo can put his work somewhere for everyone to see, and the coconut harvester in Laos can offer a part of his material possessions in a way that is materially useful for the betterment of the poet’s life.

Free as the debate is put today will cost many in the publishing industry a portion of their salary, and some their jobs, and it will take that money and give it to great writers currently outside the mainstream. And hurrah for that. But when free is really free a whole lot more of those in the industry will lose a whole lot more money and jobs; and those who benefit from the first wave of free will lose out to the same degree. And the slices of all of their pies will end up in Sao Paolo and Laos and Monrovia and the Amazon Basin and the deserts of Mongolia. And, if we really care about culture, a double and a triple hurrah for that.

©copyright Dan Holloway, July 29 2009. This is an expansion of a point I made on Jonathan Fields’ blog on July 26, and of a subsequent e-mail I sent to Dr Christine McDougall.

Free is not a Four-letter word

Well, I couldn’t really stay out of the debate, although I’ve already blogged at length about the value of giving writing away for free. The release of Chris Anderson’s “Free” and resultant hoo-ha (http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6670080.html?desc=topstory) is too much of a happening for me not to write again. I’ve already posted a few thoughts on
http://loudpoet.com/2009/07/06/free-is-wrong-for-writers-freemium-might-not-be/#comment-12230088

I’ll keep this brief as a result. The last thing I want is “Dan going on about free stuff” fatigue. I’ll also try and keep it opinionated because facts seem to be out of fashion in this debate. Personally, I just don’t understand the objection as a business model to so-called “freemium” promotion – offering a basic version of your product for free, and charging for a premium version. Music practitioners have used the model so successfully I’m not sure I can see the negative argument.

Which suggests to me the argument is ideological. People who are excited about the freemium model are, by and large, people who have day jobs and want the chance to give them up and be paid for doing what they love. People who object tend to be those who are already paid to write. I understand that people don’t want to lose their livelihoods. Of course they don’t, and of course none of us wants them to. But protectionism isn’t the answer.

Literature is a breeding ground of innovation, and should remain so. And the public should have access to as wide a range of culture as there is out there. I believe they should be able to access it for free, and decide, from a position of knowledge not ignorance, which of it they want to spend their money on.

The argument that this will pollute the cultural world with rubbish is just nonsense. If what’s offered for free outside the establishment is junk, the public will discard it, and no one in the mainstream will lose their paycheck. If some of it DOES turn out to be better, then why shouldn’t some on the “inside” take a pay cut so that some on the outside can have a slice of the pie?

My call to action is simple. Make your work available to the public for free download. Let readers decide what they want to pay for. It’s not the end of the world. It’s the beginning of an aspiration to take culture seriously. That’s why I started Free-e-day (www.freeeday.wordpress.com) as a platform to bring together givers and takers of free cultural content. I also see it across the web in great initiatives like www.jet-pack.net

Free isn’t a four-letter word. Free is good. For the producers of culture. For the consumers of culture. For culture itself. Come and embrace freevolution