Hephaestus writes “This is a different perspective on the e-books as the killer of the book publishing industry. It’s a take from the small author perspective.”
As the eBook experience improves, especially with the increased adoption of the Kindle and iPad, authors now have the same opportunity that exists now for musicians to exploit new opportunities. Like the music world, most writers also don’t expect to make a great living from writing, so for them, exposure to readers is more valuable than revenue:
If you give a writer a choice between $10,000 and 10,000 readers, the writer will always choose the latter.
After all, having 10,000 readers is a fantastic connection with which to work — at that point, all an author would have to do to make money would be to give the readers a reason to buy. For writers, there’s already a fantastic finite good that they can sell, the printed book. While this may seem counter-intuitive, we’ve seen this model work before: after a publisher gave away digital copies of a book for free, they saw their physical book sales increase 20x. So, like the musicians who embrace the opportunities that the new economy offers, writers have a similar entrepreneurial opportunity.
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