Cory Doctorow and the Publishing Revolution

December 4th, 2009 | Author: Kari Wolfe

Cory Doctorow, photo by Joi Ito, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

First of all, I have to admit something right up front: I have never read any of Cory Doctorow’s fiction works. Yeah, yeah, I’m still going to write this post about him though because after reading through a whole lot of articles about the man, I find what he has done extremely fascinating. And, I promise, I will get to reading his works

Not long ago, I sent Cory an email asking him for an interview for this blog and he politely declined it. I’m signed up for his mailing list and, yes, I read the articles – I tend to not be a fan of video lectures (too much school, I think) – and even when I’ve sent him email replying to the list messages, he has responded. Mind you, these responses are short, quick and to the point, but what do you expect from a man who’s work has been described thus.

From Seth Godin’s blog:

I sat next to Cory at a conference today. It was like playing basketball next to Michael Jordan. Cory was looking at more than 30 screens a minute. He was bouncing from his mail to his calendar to a travel site and then back. His fingers were a blur as he processed inbound mail, visiting more than a dozen sites in the amount of time it took for my neck to cramp up. I’m very fast, but Cory is in a different league entirely. Rereading this, I can see I’m not doing it justice. I wish I had a video…

For those of you who do not know who Cory Doctorow is or why all the big fuss about him: Cory Doctorow is simply the leader of what people want to call the publishing revolution. He talks at length about copyright and what copyright actually means in today’s society as well as Creative Commons licensing.

Cory is an author (and co-blogger of BoingBoing, one of the most read tech news blogs on the Internet) and through his own personal website, he has released free copies of each of his books and short stories into the wild under Creative Commons copyrights meaning the reader can do anything they want with the file, be it share it, change it’s format, etc.) as long as it is always expressly stated that the story itself is the intellectual property of Cory Doctorow. He even goes so far as to say that fanfic is a reasonable use of his stories.

Yeah, so what, right? He ALSO releases these copies at the same time as the publishing company releases his books in hardcover.

So, naturally, one would assume that if people can get it for free, that he’s not going to see any sales (or many sales) because his books are out there for anyone to get, right?

WRONG. His sales have increased.

His conclusions as to why this has happened:

Many writers have tried free e-book releases to tie in with the print release of their works. To the best of my knowledge, every writer who’s tried this has repeated the experiment with future works, suggesting a high degree of satisfaction with the outcomes

A writer friend of mine had his first novel come out at the same time as mine. We write similar material and are often compared to one another by critics and reviewers. My first novel had a free download, his didn’t. We compared sales figures and I was doing substantially better than him — he subsequently convinced his publisher to let him follow suit

Baen Books has a pretty good handle on expected sales for new volumes in long-running series; having sold many such series, they have lots of data to use in sales estimates. If Volume N sells X copies, we expect Volume N+1 to sell Y copies. They report that they have seen a measurable uptick in sales following from free e-book releases of previous and current volumes

David Blackburn, a Harvard PhD candidate in economics, published a paper in 2004 in which he calculated that, for music, “piracy” results in a net increase in sales for all titles in the 75th percentile and lower; negligible change in sales for the “middle class” of titles between the 75th percentile and the 97th percentile; and a small drag on the “super-rich” in the 97th percentile and higher. Publisher Tim O’Reilly describes this as “piracy’s progressive taxation,” apportioning a small wealth-redistribution to the vast majority of works, no net change to the middle, and a small cost on the richest few

Speaking of Tim O’Reilly, he has just published a detailed, quantitative study of the effect of free downloads on a single title. O’Reilly Media published Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, in November 2005, simultaneously releasing the book as a free download. By March 2007, they had a pretty detailed picture of the sales-cycle of this book — and, thanks to industry standard metrics like those provided by Bookscan, they could compare it, apples-to-apples style, against the performance of competing books treating with the same subject. O’Reilly’s conclusion: downloads didn’t cause a decline in sales, and appears to have resulted in a lift in sales. This is particularly noteworthy because the book in question is a technical reference work, exclusively consumed by computer programmers who are by definition disposed to read off screens. Also, this is a reference work and therefore is more likely to be useful in electronic form, where it can be easily searched

In my case, my publishers have gone back to press repeatedly for my books. The print runs for each edition are modest — I’m a midlist writer in a world with a shrinking midlist — but publishers print what they think they can sell, and they’re outselling their expectations

The new opportunities arising from my free downloads are so numerous as to be uncountable — foreign rights deals, comic book licenses, speaking engagements, article commissions — I’ve made more money in these secondary markets than I have in royalties

More anecdotes: I’ve had literally thousands of people approach me by e-mail and at signings and cons to say, “I found your work online for free, got hooked, and started buying it.” By contrast, I’ve had all of five e-mails from people saying, “Hey, idiot, thanks for the free book, now I don’t have to buy the print edition, ha ha!”

Can just anyone have similar success with this method of publishing? It is basically a combination of using what some people see as the Internet’s flaws and turning those known “enemies” into your friends and have them work for you.

This is brilliant! And, even though, I have some work to finish before I can try this out on my own, it gives me something to think about. And you too, perhaps

You can find out more about Cory (and even download his works) at http://www.craphound.com.