Charles Stross, John Scalzi, and me on giving stuff away for free at Tobias Buckell Online

Journal Entry

Charles Stross, John Scalzi, and me on giving stuff away for free

April 23rd 2007 at 12:54 pm

At the recent Penguicon Stross, Scalzi and me talked about giving stuff away to fuel sales with was captured and posted at the Time Traveler.

For those who think neither of us understands possible objections, all three of us talk about some reasons we think it may not be a good idea to give stuff away. Scalzi’s point about needing to have an existing web presence is one.

You can see Paolo Bacigalupi wondering aloud about the negatives as well here.

I haven’t listened to the podcast yet (I was there yesterday, right), so I can’t tell if you can hear Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press pointing out how on the ground experience of giving away books as a publisher have upturned one of the negative scenarios that Stross spun.

The most interesting thing in that panel was finding out that another major publisher might be pricing an ebook at a proper price point soon. Other than Baen’s rational approaches, no ebook program has made sense to me, and as an author, looking over the money made by ebooks by Baen authors, my opinion is that the inability of publishers to price ebooks properly and utilize them is probably costing me money that could be being made.

And at my stage and income level, every little bit helps.

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8 Responses so far

1. loquacious lad on Apr 23rd, 2007 at 1:47 pm

Wouldn’t it be interesting to run a auction for a piece of fiction? We might find some really interesting info about what the best market price truly is.
2. Steve Buchheit on Apr 24th, 2007 at 12:41 pm

So how come all the panels at the Cons I don’t go to sound better than the panels at the Cons I do go to? At least I can listen in on this one. Thanks, Tobias!
3. Tobias Buckell on Apr 24th, 2007 at 1:48 pm

An auction is an interesting idea, LL, I may try that out sometime for a short story.

Steve, Penguicon has unusually cool panel topics.
4. JeremyT on Apr 25th, 2007 at 10:35 am

Huh. The auction idea interests me. Let me know if you do that, Tobias.
5. Tobias Buckell on Apr 25th, 2007 at 12:53 pm

How do you guys think I should go about doing that? Who would be my potential audience for buying and how would I structure that?
6. JeremyT on Apr 25th, 2007 at 1:53 pm

Those were the things I was hoping you would figure out

Auctioning off stories directly to audiences doesn’t make sense. And I doubt editors/publishers are inclined to go to an auction for a story unless the author is so popular that they _know_ that buying that story is going to make their magazine money.

Nick Mamatas regularly sends me links to ebay auctions of small press horror authors auctioning off the rights to publish limited edition versions of the work, which as I understand it, can make a publisher some actual money. Maybe something like that. Still not a hell of a lot of potential bidders.

I have this fantasy of a centralized submissions system online, shared between as many magazines as wish/could-be-cajoled to use it. Authors create protected accounts, and they upload their fiction to their account. They set an order of submittal on the fiction, and it goes into the cue of slush piles for magazines on the site. Alternatively, they can set it as “general availiablity” and hope that the piece gets “discovered.” Editors log in and can read their slush piles, or they can browse the whole site if they want, looking for interesting pieces. They can click “accept,” “reject with form,” or “reject with reasons,” or “hold for consideration” on each piece. Authors are constantly updated on the status of their work. read, not read, etc. All completely transparent.

As an author, it’s all managed, like a Netflix. You get one rejection, the system automatically passes the piece on to the next magazine in the cue. You run out of cue, then you can trunk it, or you can add more to the cue. etc.

If such a system existed, you could set up an auction system within it. I mean, in some ways, the submitting process is just like an auction, if you’re one of those people who rank their submitting by order of pay, working from pro pubs down to semi-pro. I guess it would save a lot of time if I knew no pro editors wanted a piece, but a semi-pro was willing to pay me $50 for it.
7. Tobias Buckell on Apr 26th, 2007 at 3:48 pm

Yeah, nice vision, but I’m not sure it would work out well for me.

Still, I could create a blog post and do a comments bidding war on a short story for someone. It’s just writing up the contract details that stumps me.