Tiny Snarkmarket’s ‘free’ strategy: 200 hardcover copies of ‘New Liberal Arts’ sold in just eight hours
More innovation in publishing: Snarkmarket sold 200 hardcover copies of its book New Liberal Arts at $8.99 a pop, after which it put a free Creative Commons-licensed PDF up for anyone and everyone. So Snarkmarket make itself a cool $1,800 (less production costs, of course) before releasing the book into infinity.
Aside from the PDF’s inherent weaknesses as e-book format, this is a pretty cool idea. The tiny press run gives value to the hardcover, certainly pays for the free PDF giveaway, and gets the interest up for the next book to be thusly released. I agree with Kevin Kelly that the content seems a little thin, but it wouldn’t have to be. Kelly adds, “I’m impressed enough with the experiment to use this model on my next self-published book.” Not bad props (though I’m a little surprised that the Editor of Wired would need to self-publish).
In any case, given that it took only eight hours for New Liberal Arts to sell out, the Snarkmarketers might want to think of printing more next time.
Anybody out there think this is a viable publishing model? If so, for what genres?
Me, I’m still looking for the perfect model for a literary novel with various pretensions, er, ambitions.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:53 am
Who says he needs to self publish? Maybe he wants to self-publish, confident that his position as Wired’s editor will help sell enough copies to make him content. He might also think that the benefits of truly owning his own work without selling to a third party is enough of a benefit to self-publish.
July 9th, 2009 at 8:05 am
Good point, Spider. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Maybe he just doesn’t want to deal with the publishing hoopla and get his stuff straight out there, as he does on his websites.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Not quite sure what you meant by “still looking for the perfect model for a literary novel”, but you should certainly take a look at the experimentation going on at http://1889.ca/.
July 12th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Paul, thanks for the link. I’m going to give it a good hard look.