On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> What's the point of maintaining strict control over the reproduction of
>> creative work in a book-going- out-of-print situation like this?
>
> None. I could theoretically earn a few hundred bucks in royalties over the
> next couple of years, but only theoretically, since Verso - how to put
> this gently? - isn't always reliable about making royalty payments. I'm
> trying to decide whether it's worth the effort of doing a second,
> seriously updated edition, but that's a totally different question. I
> spent six years writing Wall Street and made <$10,000 on it, and would
> like to squeeze another couple of bucks out of it if I could. But that
> doesn't seem likely, so I'm trying to figure out the best thing to do with
> it in its present, slightly outdated form.
Looking at that math, it looks like making it free would really be your best move. On a per hour basis, this book paid you less than minimum wage. But I think it probably made you a lot more than $10,000 indirectly, through the speaking fees and paid travel that resulted from greater exposure and respect, no?
So based on that logic, if you could give away 10,000 copies for free you'd be a lot better off than if you sold 200 for $2 each, since increasing the number of people who know about you makes you more money than the raw book price. And that would be doubly true now that the raw book price is so much lower.
Of course there are other reasons to sell the original book for money, not least because it makes it legitimate in a society defined by market value. But now that that's accomplished, and the selling value of the download is so much lower, the logic really does seem to hold.
There is also a second reason that seems to apply especially to this book. Many books that go out of print will eventually someday be re-issued (or at least that is their authors' fondest hope), and if you gave away 1000s of copies for free, you'd cannabalize that future market. But here you're saying that this is so out of date that if you ever re-issue it again, it will only be as a substantially new book. In that case the free books not only wouldn't cannabalize the future market, they'd increase it, since the future book you are imagining is one that you would expect all readers of the first one to want. No?
So again, this logic wouldn't apply to all books in all stages of their distribution cycle, but it seems to apply especially well to this one. And with a moderately aggressive campaign of getting people to link to it, giving away 10,000 copies seems like it could possibly be as realistic a goal as trying to sell 200 for $2.
But of course all this reasoning is based on zero experience, just speculation, and its not my livelihood.
On the other hand, if you do go the download route, Amazon now sells a fair amount of otherwise out-of-print books in download form for very low prices. (Most recent shocker: Disraeli's 1845 _Tancred_ for 4 bucks. There can't be a huge market for that.) I would think the thing to do would either be to look into getting your book put into that form, and sold through Amazon as if it were still in print -- or alternatively, if that takes too much of a cut, to getting it listed in the the used book section of both Amazon and www.bookfinder.com. That way people who were looking for stuff by you would naturally run into it. You could also sell it on your website, but I would think this would be the way to maximize sales.
Michael