A $20 bribe won’t do; even the cash-strapped TeleBlog has its standards (humor alert). But having enjoyed your writings, I hope you’ll contribute to the regular part of the blog, not just comment. In fact, via e-mail, we decided that’s exactly what will happen.

I hope that other small publishers will join you and Rob Preece of BookForABuck.com in enriching the TeleBlog through comments and regular posts. Large publishers welcomed, too!

I’m not sure that nonwriters understand all the hassles involved in getting out a book, especially in such areas as covers. It doesn’t hurt that you’re a gifted artists and that your executive editor has experience at a much-larger house.

Cheers,
David

There are so many points to address in this, but first, thank you for your post. I’ll send you a twenty by PayPal (that’s about all I have left in the August budget for marketing). Seriously, it’s nice to be noticed for good things.

I’m a newcomer to this business and others will likely have very different opinions on what works and what doesn’t and what’s owed to the authors and the house.

My personal vision is that a community supports one another, and if our authors and readers are in community with us, it won’t (hopefully) be as hard to admit mistakes, really listen to what our readers want, be fair to everyone involved, and be successful at it.

Your post about DRM is especially timely. We have an account with Mobipocket. Our books are all DRM’d according to their rules when sold through their site. On our own site, however, none of them are. In addition, our books will be available on Fictionwise soon, and they don’t use DRM either. That probably sounds to some like a welcome mat to thieves.

In addition, I was especially intrigued by your post because I had an interested author decide not to submit to Drollerie just this last week because I couldn’t guarantee that her story wouldn’t be stolen. No one can guarantee that. Nevertheless, she decided to only submit to publishers who didn’t publish electronically until a solution is found. Considering that scans of the last Harry Potter were available on the web within a few hours of the first sale, I don’t think that’s the solution either, but I can’t fault her for wanting to protect her investment of time, energy and creativity.

The thing is, and I’m sure I’m oversimplifying and/or making this too anecdotal (I’m a terrible debater), if we all wanted to (and were willing to pay the consequences), we could do anything we wanted. If enough of us did it, law wouldn’t stand a chance.

Lots of us don’t steal, lie, or create sock puppets on the Internet. Lots of us, when we’re caught doing something wrong, own up to it and fix our mistakes. We all, or enough of us, agree to abide by the law so that we live in a mostly civilized society. One of the biggest buzz words in the post-Enron business world is ethics, bearing with it the idea that we not only owe it to one another and ourselves to do our business ethically, but that we should say so as well.

What’s that got to do with e-books? It’s too late to be brief, so I’ll at least try to be pertinent. Businesses are made up of people. Most people are simply trying to enjoy their lives, do their jobs, read a book. They’re not trying to cheat other people. If they do cheat, they think they’re cheating an amorphous corporate entity, that the one they cheated deserves it due to high prices, poor workmanship, or just because the other guy is richer than they are.

Consider Napster, the poor embarrassed example of media piracy. My son loved Napster. Why not? The music companies were ripping off anyone who loved music and the artists too. That may not be the capital T truth, but that was certainly the perception amongst him and his friends. Napster got shot down. But then my son and his friends (all musicians themselves) learned about other labels, and artists who put their music out on their own label, and many other ways to subvert the dominant paradigm. On top of that, iTunes came along, and you could buy that one song you wanted for only $1.99 plus get free music every Tuesday. So, community solutions served to enlighten him and his friends to new ways of doing things that didn’t break the law or their own personal codes of ethics.

Cost is a factor, community vs. corporation is a factor, education is a factor.

Drollerie Press is not an amorphous corporate entity. Our authors visit with the readers in chat (come visit us for the next one!), we answer every e-mail as quickly as possible, we try to stay abreast of the industry, we reach out to our readers, we donate to charity and we try to keep our prices reasonable while still having enough to keep the lights on and the authors paid.

One of the first positive bits of feedback we received was in regards to our pictures. We were told that it was nice to see who was behind the mask. I much prefer to be on the other side of the camera, but it just seemed good business sense to let people know who we were.

Okay, this is getting far too long. I do believe Social DRM is a viable solution–in conjunction with other efforts–because it stems one particular stream. As I posted in the comments to the DRM cross-post on LiveJournal, someone may not mind passing along a piece of media to 5,000 of their closest friends (or even recognize it as theft), but they might be a little less eager if it had their name, address and “for a good time call….” plastered all over it. That makes it easier for them to choose to be on the side of the angels, as it were. It makes securing the piece of media beneficial to them, as well as to the creator/publisher/ distributor of it. I believe they call that enlightened self interest.