Even if he were paid for his appearance (and he may have .. I have no clue/interest on how these things work) it was certainly a hell of a lot of work for whatever payoff there was.

But as I’ve suggested before, I think this is what makes someone like Scalzi or Doctorow, etc be able to pull this off. It’s a multi-pronged strategy that, to some extent, can’t be an explicit strategy or it comes off as fake, because it’s almost like building a following for an author in the same way that you see, say, bands on the college circuit building up an audience.

Personally, I couldn’t do that, and I admire the folks who do. But that’s going to be very hard to replicate, especially in genres where the fan boys and girls aren’t such a big part of the market (for example, I imagine the buyers of a top-selling scifi book are far more homogeneous from book to book than are the buyers for top-selling historical romances).

Something else I’m just throwing out here about authors is the huge fanfic communities. I know people whose fiction reading has gone from several novels a month to almost entirely fanfic, which they’re also writing as part of a community. Again, I’m not so sure how well this can be exploited outside the scifi/fantasy genres, but it’d be interesting to see author start to explicitly market to and accomodate the fanfic-ers as a way to drive sales.

Most companies seem to approach fanfic with benign neglect — we could sue you but we choose not to for now. I could see someone writing, say a scifi trilogy, giving explicit licensing for noncommercial fanfic. One of the things I could imagine doing would be to write story X and leave subplots Y and Z open for fanfic-ers to explore. They still need to buy the real books to get the context, so if it’s popular enough it’s like they’re buying the source material for the fanfic Bible (which people are doing now anyway).

For example, the worst scifi novels are typically written by authors trying to expand loose ends (see Star Wars’ “Clone Wars” and Star Trek’s novelized version of the Genetic Wars…ugh). Much better to not only allow but encourage others to pick up those threads in non-commercial settings whereby they drive sales to the commercial books and avoid the Marketers of Dune phenom.

> I’d rather scream at Steve Jobs than those
> NYC Suits. I’d *get* somewhere with Jobs.

*snicker*

It’s clear you’ve never met His Steveness.

As for DRM and “not paying attention”—well, that’s indeed all the more reason for Scalzi to feel a little grouchy. He’s not talking about isolated notes here. For latecomers, yes, Scalzi Gets It about “protection.” If I didn’t make that clear enough in the original post, I will now.

Meanwhile, at the more cosmic level, let’s hope that the suits in the publishing business can pay more attention to readers’ persistent hatred of DRM. Just wait until those Kindle owners want to move on to other machines that can’t read Jeff’s special format.

Thanks,
David

Well what are you doing LETTING THEM HAVE the e-rights to begin with? Ain’t no frikkin way I am EVER EVER giving up rights again. Once Apple “legits” ebooks, baby, NYC can sink in the ocean and take the putrid print publishing world with it (with NO apologies to print pub contributors to teleread — well, except to that one woman who KEPT her e-rights. Right on!). My stuff will be at the iTunes Store so I can do silly things like pay rent regularly. I’d rather scream at Steve Jobs than those NYC Suits. I’d *get* somewhere with Jobs. Let the print publishers start worrying about THEIR rent!

OTOH, you have occasionally featured individuals who post their novels/whatever online for free then take them down a bit later and conclude that this is an completely ineffective marketing method. But Scalzi is a good example of how that can be successfully exploited. I can’t be the only one who had never heard of Scalzi until running across a link to Agent to the Stars online, reading it and thinking “where can I buy more like this?”