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.

Crystal Kindles: what does 2010 hold in store in the literary world?

It feels like I've been away for an age. In reality it's been a week in Northern France eating rillettes and thinking about all things literary.

Which has given me time to think about the future - more important to get my foot in the door and be the first to ask what 2010 holds for the literary world. It wouldn't be a proper one of my blog posts if I just said "This and this and this will happen" so I'm putting a bit of a spin on things. First up, a few predictions about what I think the mainstream will be touting as the hot topics of 2010. Then a little something about the hot hot topics, the nascent waves they haven't seen coming. Not too much on the why and wherefore or I'll be here all night - just enough to get the conversation going; and maybe make some of it self-fulfilling...

Don't forget: when January 1, 2011 comes and I was wrong on every count, you can all have a good old laugh at my expense.

So:

Read the blogs, visit the websites, read the trade papers, flick through the magazines, and what will you see in 2010 (the bandwagons it's too late to jump on though many will try)

1. Google Wave, Apple Tablet, Wiki-software as my TECH no-brainers (and yes, sadly I DO think some people will still think the Kindle's news in 2010)

2. PUBLISHERS will be talking steampunk (yes, STILL - you only think it's passe already because you're ahead of the game) and post-recession (thrillers, dramas of the Full Monty ilk, and lifestyle books - both how-to and "how I survived"). They will lock horns with writers over advances and publicity (or, at least, the more foresighted ones will). They'll also suddenly catch on to serialisation - Victoria Barnsley got there this year, when it was still almost newsworthy, but very few have followed.

3. The LITERATI will probably, courtesy of Neil Gaiman and the fact literature always lags behind art and Gormley got there this year, be talking crowdsourcing

4. PUNDITS will be banging on about the success or failure of Richard Nash's Cursor. The freemium debate will, inevitably, linger on like a stale odour, and some people will still think the price of ebooks is a debate because ebook sales will rise apace, masking the facts that 1 - talking about ebook pricing will be by then a category error in terms of obsolescent business models, and 2 - ebooks will, by early 2011, already be on the way out (despite continued rise in numbers). Note - this is a dead topic for pundits, but very much not for writers - the year and a half the ebook boom has left is very much worth riding.

5. WRITERS be trying to ride the steampunk wave once they've sucked vampires dry. They will also be engaging in full-scale war over Creative Commons, ebook pricing, and how to make a living from content provision. We will see some real disgruntlement at publishers, too, over decreasing advances and increased marketing demands - with particular objection to the demand for authors to do webcasts and YouTube trailers. More writers will catch on to the value fo chapbooks and special editions - expect to see beautiful one-offs and companion pieces.

And here's where the action's really at in 2010 - the waves that are still way out at sea with plenty of time to catch them before they break:

1. in TECH, intelligent paper is a long way from being viable as a mass commodity, but for those who love the book, it's where the smart money is. And for those who like reading on the run, the iPhone is old news but it's still the only news in town, but expect a raft of new apps from serialisations to interactive reading to exciting blue-tooth functionality like random read-shares and collaborative reading (blue-tooth-operated collaborative writing harnessing flashmob appeal is the future of wiki-software, but I'm not sure even the good people of Silicon Valley have figured that out yet - the potential for creating geo-specific novels this way, meshing geocaching, LAN gaming, extreme tourism, flashmobbing, and wiki-creativity IS THE MOST EXCITING DEVELOPMENT I SEE COMING, but it may be for 2011). The only Tablet worth speaking of is the one for the massive hangover B & N and Waterstone's will catch when their e-readers go belly-up. I like ether-pad and the kind of stuff MCM did with 3D1D, involving the reader in the writer's real-time editing.

2. The smart book trends for PUBLISHERS next year are world fiction (come on, we have so much access to so much incredible global talent - we need imprints backed by quality translation teams to tap it); and post-environmentalism: in particular books focused on individualism and existentialism (fiction AND non-fiction) - yet another reprint fo Epicurus would fly off teh shelves, and anything else that debunks the delayed gratification model of environmentalism as people realise 1. we're screwed anyway 2. there are more immediate dangers than climate change and 3. saving things for the future is a philosophy that has serious emotional as well as logical flaws. On a related note, look towards historical fiction that captures the same spirit - the 1920s, fin de siecle, early 1960s and early/mid 1980s are hot for this reason (in particuar the hedonism of the period - Punk is passe, New Romanticism will be, for a very brief window, cutting edge).

3.The LITERATI to watch will be playing cross-genre games - fed up of Bunny Munro and Punk Fictin, writers will want a piece of the music/film/art pie - and they'll want to bend them in literary ways. Collaborations are out (sorry, Mr Gaiman, you're passe in very many ways in 2010, albeit still successful), and DIY is in. And, dare I say it, as people start playing around with form and genre - Modernism is back.

4. PUNDITS may finally sit up and start asking ethical questions about the global implications of the future face of publishing - in particular, how to embrace, expose but not exploit emerging talent.

5. WRITERS should stop locking horns with publishers over advances and push and embrace new contractual models like ebook only contracts and zero advance contracts. They should also consider direct outsourcing - and in particular look to start creaming top music industry PRs into the literary sphere.

Can't make up my mind:

I want to say something about self-publishing and print-on-demand espresso machines, but I really can't make up my mind where to put them. My personal feeling is self-publishing is just a non-topic now - it's about how not whether it's acceptable. Espresso machines are tricky. I thought 9 months ago they were the saviour of the Long Tail. I still think they have a role to play, but I didn't realise just how quickly intelligent paper would progress.

And the "hot topics" that are just stone cold

I think Indie will be a buzzword in 2010 - bookstores and collectives in particular - but I also think these are battles that have been won already. There may even be people who tout niche as hot - it's not. It wasn't this year when I was talking about it. It certainly won't be next year. Collective likewise. I'm afraid anyone who is going to succeed with any of these has already started.

PLAY THE GAME AT HOME by ticking them off one at a time as they headline - or rather, watch as the bingo card stays blank. Happy predicting :-)

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.

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