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By a TeleBlog Contributor

Editor’s note: We love to run thoughtful e-book-related essays from authors. Publishers, PR people, pundits, press—we hear from them all, but not the authors they’re talking about. This post is by an author, Luke Bergeron, who writes mispeled, where it first appeared in a somewhat different form. – Paul Biba.

b33ffca134d5e4e9941b78865501f3f0.jpegI’m a writer—at least, I like to fancy myself as one. My first novella, Neither a Borrower, is on Scribd.com. I posted it there for free because no one buys novellas and I’m still learning how to write, so charging for it didn’t seem right. Neither a Borrower is a fair effort, but I’m still learning.

image I hold a master’s degree in English, a degree I earned by completing a novel as a thesis: Disappearances. Although it earned me a degree, Disappearances will probably never see the light of day, unless I finally get sick of revisions, call it done, and post it on Scribd for free.

Now I am three-fourths through my second novel, and although I keep a fairly pessimistic view of my writing, this new project makes me feel as if it’s decent. Where to find a home for it?

Physical print is dying. It hasn’t died yet, but is well on its way. Amazon’s e-book sales are growing every month, and more and more companies are entering the e-book marketplace. For accessibility, green, and profitability reasons, print is going electronic. Good.

But what does that mean for the author? That’s what this post is about, viewed from my own stance as an author and a lover of technology. So here we go:

Assumption 1: E-books are the future. Everyone already knows this. No one is exactly sure what form they will take [read on a dedicated device, read on a computer screen, how to deliver content, etc.], but there is little disagreement that e-books are coming and will eventually rule the day.

Assumption 2: People prefer free content over paid content. You take a good app and put it up on the Apple app store for free and there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself ruling one of the tops slots, even if only for a few days. You take an awesome app and put it up for 99 cents, and the fight to the top is much harder.

Assumption 3: Advertising has traditionally funded free content. Television commercials. Websites. You get the point.

Assumption 4: Piracy is a problem that needs to be dealt with. This assumption needs a little more discussion. The problem with piracy is twofold:

1. Ease of Use: A big advantage of piracy is that it’s often easier to get content through pirate channels than official channels. Want to find that episode of LOST you missed? Why go to iTunes when The Pirate Bay is just as easy? Want to find a season of a show that’s not on Hulu? Too lazy to go to the store and buy the DVD? Mininova it. It’s easy. Piracy will be drastically reduced once all content is online and is just as easy to use as bit torrent, price issues aside.

2. Cost: No matter how easy and cheap you make your content, there are always going to be people who would rather rip it off for free, even if ripping it off is much more difficult than just paying for it, not to mention illegal. However, cost is still a factor, and when it comes to digital content, cheaper is better. You can’t get cheaper than free.

Assumption 5: Open communities mean a small percentage of good content and a huge percentage of craptent (I love me some portmanteaus). Youtube has tons of content and most of it sucks. It’s a great place for viral internet videos, but not a great place for professional caliber content. Why? No filters. So you have to figure out a barrier, and money is a good way to do that. Like Robert Heinlein said, if a man gives you his word, make him pay cash. Since you can’t charge for the content, instead, pay for its creation.

Assumption 6: Authors need to get paid. Constant devotion to a craft is what makes people better at it. I’ve heard that every writer has to write [insert X number] words of crap before they write something good. If I taught creative writing, the introductory class would be nothing more than a 5,000 word a week deadline for a semester. If students could pass that, then they’d have written enough to actually start learning things like characterization, good dialogue, and how to pace a scene. But that’s an aside. The point is, authors need time to get better. Money = Time. Before I got a job I could afford to write for eight hours a day. Now, two hours is very expensive. It wouldn’t take that much money for an author to be able to write full time. People will gladly make less money if they get to do what they love.

Thought Blender it all together: When you put all these assumptions together into a big thought blender, set the thing to high-speed whip, what comes out?

Sponsored e-books. This is already been done online, mostly in the IT sector, but I’d like to see it come to creative content, too. Here, let me explain.

Circumvent piracy altogether by making content free in the first place. People are going to rip it off or they aren’t, but why rip it off if it’s already free? Piracy becomes a non-issue. However, free content makes no money for the content creator (in the case of e-books, the author), so s/he doesn’t have nearly as much time to devote to the craft. This means content is crappier, if for no other reason than it can’t have enough time devoted to its creation. Free content also means no barrier of entry. There needs to be a way to offer free content, but still have a barrier of entry.

Enter advertising. What if e-books could be sponsored by advertising? Say, a logo watermark on the bottom of every page, or an index section about the sponsoring company, or something else. Of course, it goes without saying that the advertising must be very unobtrusive and must (absolutely must!) not have control over the content.

Since e-book distribution is basically free, the only costs incurred by the sponsoring company are for the content itself, that is, paying the author. The author makes enough money to have time to hone his/her craft, the sponsorship company gets 300 digital pages of (unobtrusive!) advertising, and the community gets content for free. Since the book is paid for and sponsored, the community is assured that this book is good enough that someone was paid to write it, rather than a bunch of craptent.

Before you read the riot-act about all the flaws and negatives of this idea, let’s address some of them:

Negative: Author Royalties – The traditional publishing model puts the author as a stakeholder in the book’s monetary success. An advance is paid against royalties, and royalties pay the author for the book. In the sponsorship model, the author is paid a lump sum when the book is finished and ready for distribution. The sum can be negotiated before the work is written or when the book is finished. That part doesn’t matter. What’s important is that the work is paid for by the company once, rather than over time with an advance and royalties. The reason traditional royalty methods will not work are threefold:

1. Content distribution is very hard to track over the internet. As things go viral and spread, they move through different channels. It’s impossible to track them all. Thus, how would you pay an author for copies when copies can be made anywhere?

2. Advertising is nebulous in how much business it drives to the company. It’s difficult to say how much business is brought to the company from a singular source. This tracking difficulty would make a royalty-based system not feasible.

3. Advertising is an investment by the sponsor. The sponsor assumes that for a lump sum (the ad campaign) they will receive more business. The better the campaign, the more business, and the smaller overall percentage an investment in the ad campaign becomes. Royalties make an ad campaign into a flat percentage, rather than a diminishing percentage as more business drives more profits.

Negative: Content Ownership – Who owns the content? The sponsoring company or the author? This is probably the stickiest point, and the mess of current copyright law isn’t going to make it any easier to figure out. Obviously, since the work is being released to the public for free, ownership over the content itself is hard to figure out. What rights does an author have to sell the movie rights to a sponsored e-book? Or to try to sell copies (though I don’t know why anyone would want to buy this, since it can be obtained for free)? Can the sponsoring company make changes to the book without the consent of the author? All these questions would have to be answered, and I don’t know enough about how this theoretical model works to be able to given definitive answers, but here are the important things to note about this:

This model will not work if the sponsoring company has any say about the content aside from “I will sponsor that book” or “I will not sponsor that book.” “I will sponsor that book if the protagonist drinks Pepsi and praises it’s clear, crisp taste in chapter 3” should not be an option [note: this post is not sponsored by Pepsi, ha, ha]. Either Pepsi wants to sponsor the book or not. This means that edgier material will have a hard time finding sponsorship, but, alas, all sponsored art has always had this problem, and I don’t know how to solve it here. Sponsors should not be able to change the work in any form without express written consent of the author. This should be in the contracts.

Of course, you will have some authors who will get dollars signs in their eyes and sell-out, putting Pepsi in the hands of all their characters. There isn’t a whole lot anyone can do about that, but companies will learn that sponsored books by sell-out authors will not be read nearly as much. Companies would be well-served by maintaining consumer faith.

Other rights should stay with the author by default, unless agreed upon in the beginning. If McDonald’s wants to sponsor a book and they want the movie rights, they should pay more for both. If they sponsor a book and want the movie rights later, they should have to pay for them. Companies shouldn’t be able to “F” the author.

Negative: Finding an advertising balance: This is basically a stem of the sell-out and content ownership discussion, but the advertising throughout the book should be unobtrusive. A small watermark by the page number, an “about the sponsor” section – whatever, it just can’t interfere with the reading experience or people won’t read it. I also suggest graphical ads over text ads, since graphics can be instantly absorbed. You can’t guarantee that anyone is going to read text. Depending on the device the e-book is read on, time-based ads could be possible as well, though new tech would be needed for that. I strongly discourage this model, but it is an option. Keep in mind, however, the more obtrusive the advertising, the more likely some pirate will hack the sponsored e-book and release an ad-free copy. You want ads that are obtrusive enough to get the product noticed, but not so annoying that pirates remove the ads. It’s a fine balance, and one that should be studied.

Negative: Authors don’t want to be sponsored. Fine, they don’t have to be. They can continue publish through regular channels or not publish at all. Me, I’d rather be published than not, and I’d rather be paid for my work than not.

Anyway, those are the negative that must be overcome to this sort of system. Let’s briefly cover the positives:

Positive: Barrier of Entry for Content: Craptent content, like the majority of YouTube, can be prevented by sponsorship. If readers know that a company thought the book was good enough to sponsor, they know the book has some semblance of quality. Sure, as e-books get more popular, people will distribute free e-books (scribd is already doing this), but a sponsored book will receive more attention because it’s theoretically better. However, keeping content control in the hands of the author is an absolute must in order to maintain consumer trust in sponsored content. Product placement in a narrative itself will ruin any goodwill toward sponsored content and people will stop reading the book.

Positive: Free Content – Piracy not only made a boatload of content on the internet free (even if it’s illegal), it also popularized new methods of distribution. These methods, bit torrent especially, are a problem only if companies want to make money directly on content. If content is already free, these alternative distribution methods only serve to get the content distributed more widely. Also, free content has a much lower barrier of entry for people, since it costs them nothing but a few minutes to check it out.

Positive: Can be Lucrative for the Author: Depending on the lump sum for the book, authors stand to make more money for creating the content than with current distribution models. Currently an author will make only a small percentage of the shelf-price of a book. With sponsorship, an author can possibly make more, and make it all at once. This could also increase productivity, since authors see a looming and decent return on a project.

Positive: Hours of advertising for a low cost: If the content is decent, advertisers have hours of undivided attention to spend with consumers. It takes the average reader 6-12 hours to read a typical novel. All the time can be spent with unobtrusive advertising to a consumer. Companies would kill for that amount of time. And all it costs the company is the price of the content production (the author’s paycheck) and a little bandwidth.

So that’s the idea: sponsored e-books. Would the model actually work? I’m not sure. I think that it would, but a few things need to happen to find out:

1. E-books and e-reading devices need to become more prevalent. This will happen with sponsored e-books or not. It’s only a matter of time.

2. A company bold enough to give it a shot.

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that I’ve been thinking about a distribution method (and way to profit from my work) for my new novel, and sponsorship is something I’d like to try. It’s a way to get independently produced content to the public without relying on the arcane agent/solicitation/big publishing house system, and still reasonably profit from my work, since sponsorship would probably net me more than going with a small publishing house.

I’m not done with my second novel yet, but as I get closer to finishing it and start my revisions, sponsorship is something I will definitely be looking into.

Physical print is dead. Content wants to be free. Sponsorship could be the wave of the future.

Me, I like to make waves.

-mispeled out.

 
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