1. the number of hours he put in to write the book, assuming it was, say, 4 hrs/page (I've forgotten the formula) which is probably low-balling it because i'm not including editing time, phone time, the time it took him to get the verso deal to begin with, etc.
my copy of wall st is in a crate, but ISTR it was 200 page or so. 200 x 4hrs. = 800
6000/800 = a wage of $7.5/hr
This is a crap wage for a freelancer who has to pay taxes, insurance, own unemployment, own sick days, own vacation days, etc. Even if he only spent 1 hr per page, which is what people who write for eZines say they spend (tops), it's $30/hr and this is still a crap wage for a freelancer who is really making, effectively, about $18/hr after taxes/insurance/bennies/overhead. (typical formula is to add 1/3 at least)
2. So, even if we low ball it, we have a crap wage. Now imagine that Doug must spend another wad of time to promote and sell his book, putting up a blog, contacting people, facebooking, twittering, radio shows, tv if he can, going to parties, doing book readings, doing podcasts of his chapters, schmoozing, posting on the list/blogs/twitter so as not to be one of those people who only try to pitch their stuff without ever getting back, you can easily see him spending another 4 solid weeks getting a pr campaign off the ground and another 10 hrs/week thereafter for 6 months, tapering off to maybe 5 hrs per week in maintenance mode. (We'll leave out of the mix stuff like computer maintenance, security, upgrades, troubleshooting web hosting problems, blog design/upgrades/patching, etc.)
3. The response rate on the Web is 98/2 - a really good one is 96/4 which is about what a good traditional marketing campaign yields. For every 100 people you reach, 2 will order the book.
Of those two, the response rate for donating money is another 98/2.
To get just two people to download the book, you have to reach 100. To get 2 people to actually pay 10 for the book, you have to read 5000
4. To get 600 people to buy the book for $10/ you'd need to reach 1.5 million people.
I'm sure my math is fucked on this one, but you get my basic point. IN order to clear a decent wage, let's say $60/hr as a freelancer which should take care of the bennies and taxes (we haven't even discussed retirement plans, etc.) you'd probably need to double that and reach 3 million people.
This is exactly the bullshittery doug was talking about when there was some assinine discussion about Prince awhile back. Now you don't just have to have a considerable skill such as writing a book/making music/wevs, you also have to have the talent to be good at PR, good at schmoozing the web, good at tech-related stuff, etc.
> On Sun, 4 Sep 2011, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>>> $6000 for the book Wall Street
>>
>> It was a great deal for Verso, which made something like $300,000
>> from
>> the book.
>
> So you made 2% of the take?
>
> I honestly have to wonder whether you would do any worse on an
> aggresive
> cyber tip jar basis. That is, if you wrote a book, told people they
> could
> download it for free but if they liked it, the suggested donation was
> 10
> bucks.
>
> Or alternatively, has anyone ever financed a book via Kickstarter?
> Where
> nobody would pay unless you reached your goal of say $20k? And then
> you
> could do the tip jar on top of that?
>
> Just wondering out loud.
>
> Michael
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)