Both ends of a pointy stick
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009Twist recently pointed me at a rather interesting article by Paul Duffield, one of the artists working on the Freak Angels comic.
He writes about marketing decisions behind content, but as someone who’s been both a creator and a publisher, I feel he misses a vital point: It’s not his money if his product is a major fucking flop.
Enki Bilal = Awesome, but very weird shit
You know what I really love? Quirky art-house movies, novels that have an amazing amount of exposition and social commentary, and weird trippy comics… All things that are usually massive market failures, only propped up by the commercial success of other intellectual properties! The music industry is the primary example of this, but it exists across all content/creative industries, from movies to video games.
Science & Swords would probably be able to get its very own independent market if they actually bothered to use their site's mascots, like Alurah & Aislin here, in short fiction anthologies or comics.
As everything pretty much has to balance the budgets, you’re only going to see the big titles, unless you’re going to a specialist book shop, such as Science & Swords (Ask for Ruz, tell him I sent you) and actually getting a recommendation from the guy behind the counter, because sales are so low on obscure titles that they’ve got few customers as all the big books are on sale for 30% below RRP at Borders and Kmart anyway, so these guys have nothing better to do but read their obscure books all day. It’s part of the reason they work at those kinds of shops in the first place.
If you’re wanting to make a title that you’re just wanting to have put out there as a piece of art, that’s fantastic… But if you’re expecting someone else to pay for it, it’s also the height of vanity, and you’ll just end up in fights between creative and bean-counting types. See picture above.
Hey look! An author relying on their own skill to do their marketing!
Nowadays, even this vanity publishing market is well catered for, thanks to eBooks and print on demand publishing services like LuLu.com. Authors don’t have to spend any money on publishing themselves. No money on marketing, either, if they don’t want to. The only time a cost is incurred is when a customer orders a book, and they pay for every part of the production process with these P.O.D. books, with authors getting a similar amount of royalty.
It’s win-win for authors and publishers, but lose-lose for non-chain bookstores and readers. Non-chain bookstores simply can’t afford to be a part of this process, and customers aren’t going to hear about any of these authors that may be good,except via word of mouth. Consumers can’t do any due diligence as they can’t check the actual book out, flick through it like they might at a store. The only way to see is if the P.O.D. site has No# of sales listed, or allows for other customers to do reviews… And even then, avaricious authors can game the system by writing their own reviews.
With that said, a good independent author will often put their work up somewhere else for people to see it before hand… quite often a blog.
For those that like David’s post though, and wish to follow up on it, his blog is here: http://spoonblog.blogspot.com/
