New distribution methods keep cropping up – time for the book trade to catch on
By Paul Biba
This new movie, Blank, is being sold on DVD for $14.95, but is also being made available as a torrent for free, the director hoping that watchers will make a contribution. I downloaded the movie and the directory contains a file with the following message: Annodam Films released the feature film “BLANK” from writer director Rick L. Winters on March 21, 2009 and made it available on all platforms, DVD, online streaming and for FREE on Mininova and other torrent sites for everyone to enjoy. If you liked this movie, please donate a small amount to Annodam Films. Thanks! Included in this file is a Paypal link.
We’ve seen this with music, now with films, and it’s time that the book industry to a hard look at itself and figured out how to take advantage of innovative sales methods.
Here is more info from TorrentFreak. You can download the torrent from Mininova.
Established in 2000 by director Rick L. Winters, Annodam Productions is an independent film company. A forward looking outfit, Annodam will premiere its latest movie ‘Blank‘, worldwide today. …
While the plot may seems standard Hollywood fare, the way this movie has been financed and is set to be distributed is not – Director Rick L.Winters explains, “The thing that makes this film unique is that it is a co-op based concept where the entire cast and crew worked on a deferred percentage of the film’s gross. In other words, the cast and crew own a percentage of the film’s gross, so the profits are not going to Hollywood executives but instead into the pockets of the filmmakers themselves.”
After receiving several distribution offers for ‘Blank’, Rick turned them all down.
“I have seen firsthand the greed that lurks in the Hollywood corporate circles,” he said while explaining that after he released his first film, the cast and crew couldn’t understand why a distribution company was making all the money. So instead, Rick decided to let the audience distribute ‘Blank’ for him – via BitTorrent.
March 21st, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Having experimented with the ‘pay what you’d like’ method, I wish these guys the best of luck but have low expectations. People may mean to pay, but actually getting around to it seems to be a low priority (go figure)
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
March 21st, 2009 at 4:20 pm
My entries are being lost again.
I suggested that this model hasn’t worked for me and I suspect it won’t work for them, either. But good luck.
Rob Preece
March 21st, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Did you donate, Paul?
Your answer will pretty much give you an idea of what kind of ‘advantage’ there is to the ‘honesty box’ model.
March 21st, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Actually, I did, even though I haven’t watched it yet.
March 21st, 2009 at 5:21 pm
You’re old school, Paul. I wonder how many Gen-X/Yers would pay up?
The problem with this system is that it is an extra effort to pay for the content. It’s kinda like the reverse of Amazon’s 1-click system. Your desire to get the product has already been satiated… no need to pay.
Which is why I wouldn’t pay. Not because the product is bad or that I don’t wish to support their endeavours … but because the impulse of desire has already faded after download. I won’t pay … because I don’t need to.
Does that make sense?
March 21st, 2009 at 6:45 pm
The distributors of the movie Blank say “If you liked this movie, please donate a small amount to Annodam Films.”
This seems to be the classic shareware model for raising funds. Rob Preece mentions that he has experimented with this model. TeleRead ran a story about the author Richard Herley who offered his work “The Penal Colony” and other novels as shareware.
Back in 1999 SF author John Scalzi put his first novel “Agent to the Stars” online as shareware. He accepted donations through 2004. Scalzi says “I made about $4,000 that way, which was not shabby considering I was not a known quantity in science fiction at the time”. Scalzi also obtained over $600 for the short story “How I Proposed to My Wife: An Alien Sex Story” via the shareware model.
The ebook shareware experiment with the highest profile was probably the disastrous serialization of “The Plant” by Stephen King in 2000. King decided that too few of the people who downloaded his work were paying for it, so he stopped writing the novel in the middle and terminated the project.
March 22nd, 2009 at 8:21 am
This model is an ecosystem that is self-regulating. If enough people pay, the publisher will put out more content, and more publishers will offer their content for free. If people don’t pay, the system dies.
So if you like the work, and you take the time to pay a small amount, then everybody wins. You get the content for a very low price. And the publisher can publish without DRM (without DRM is good for everybody) — and makes a bit of money, to keep his work going.
There are two keys to this system’s survival and success. First, you need to have great content. When I download any “donation ware” software, and it really works beautifully to solve my problem — then I shoot off a donation right away. I want to pay to thank the creator and to encourage the product development. I love these products and services and I want them to keep on going: Wikipedia, Open Office, Project Gutenberg, Smultron, Zip Creator, TechGuy.org, … and so many more.
The second key to survival: the publishers should let the users choose how much they want to donate.
It’s not easy to decide if Stephen King’s experiment with donation-ware ebooks was an utter failure, or a smashing triumph. King made some mistakes: he set his bar high (he wanted 75% of the downloaders to pay); he raised his prices from one dollar to two dollars; and he recycled a 100-year-old Nathaniel Hawthorne tale about a killer philodendron. Yes, “the King” quit in the middle of it, because — he said — he wasn’t making as much money this way, compared with his usual methods, where readers pay first and read later.
Keep in mind that, before quitting “The Plant”, King took in — as I remember it — more than $ 400,000. … (If that number is incorrect, someone please correct me. I think that is the amount he profited, after spending around $ 200,000 to set up and manage the website and the system for downloading. It’s strange that the long WikiPedia article on this subject does not mention the amount of money that King took in.)
That $ 400,000 was not enough for Stephen, but I imagine that most publishers would be mildly satisfied.
Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks
March 22nd, 2009 at 11:17 am
Michael Pastore comments on the amount of money that Stephen King obtained for “The Plant”. Most authors would be ecstatic if they had obtained even a fraction of the monetary return that King experienced. The New York Times article “Stephen King’s E-Tale Didn’t Do Too Shabbily” states:
When I said above that the experiment was disastrous I meant that it was disastrous for the nascent ebook market, and for the people who were left with a truncated book after conscientiously paying for each installment.