>Out of $27 discounted price, you get $1.50. How bad does that suck? I
>had to get out my scientific calculator to figure the miniscule
>percentage-- 5.5%. There are a lot of people making a lot of money in
>this business, and the guy who writes the books isn't.
>
>Sorry for the rant, but crappy royalty rates really irk me.
>
>
It's rotten -- right down there with a musician's take on an album and
the share of Photoshop's retail price that goes to Adobe's programmers.
I almost decided to self-publish, but decided it was better to have this
book make it into major stores and act as a mass-market Linux advocacy
tool than to sell one-fifth as many copies and make 10 times as much per
copy.
Now here's another funny stat: Warren Woodford can buy copies wholesale
for about $16 and sell them through Mepis.org for $27 or even the cover
price of $29.95 -- and get that cover price by including an extra CD
with more software on it or some other low-cost-to-him premium. So in
effect Warren gets a manual written by me at Prentice Hall's expense.
Plus Warren gets a chance to convert the book's readers into Mepis
subscribers -- invaluable marketing at no cost to him.
Me? I own right to the videos and the name. As I said, I'll give away
most/all videos on line low-rez, but will sell high-rez versions on CD
or DVD -- probably on CD despite lower quality (but still good enough
for 640X480) because not everyone has a computer with a DVD player. I'll
probably get something on the order of $19.95 for 3 CDs. This will make
me money, assuming I market the things with any competence at all.
But creators making money directly from their efforts? And only from the
act of creation? That is to laugh. And this is why free software is not
such a bad deal for programmers as it seems at first -- the actual
programmers get such a small cut of the end price that it hardly makes a
difference. Get a decent method of transferring money directly from user
to creator, whether you're talking about music, software or writing, and
this may start to change.
I'm doing my little experiment with the videos, but Bob Young is using
some of his Red Hat money to do it in a much bigger way.
http://www.lulu.com/ is Bob's latest venture. Interesting, eh?
I'll be writing about it soon.
- Robin
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked
Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages
posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 19:59:59 EDT