During a discussion with someone else about giving things away that you'd normally charge for, this insight came up: When you take the price tag off something, you deprive most people of the easiest way they have to gauge its value.

I meet a lot of folks at cons who aren't rich, but they've often doing okay and are at the con because they can ( Read more... )

On this blog, I've talked recently about two Blu-ray titles that I felt were substandard and should not be purchased: the U.S. edition of Ghost in the Shell 2.0, and the Lionsgate / Canal+ version of Ran.

I want to make it clear that despite my feelings about these titles - and despite my feelings about Canal+ generally - I am not calling for ( Read more... )

Another odd bit of news about that cancelled GLBT zombie anthology:

Based on his words and the editor’s first statement, this anthology was pulled for fear of people’s reaction. (The editor now says there were concerns the anthology would be seen as a gimmick, and that it wouldn’t have good stories.) ... Whatever his personal views on ( Read more... )

A pretty good summation of the e-book pricing squabble at POD People, which spurred some thought about how much prices can be driven down. My quick answer: not much.

If a hardback book, as an example, is priced $26.99 retail, and the subsequent paperback is priced $15.99, regardless of windowing, is the publishing company saying the author’s ( Read more... )

Two ends of the spectrum. Or maybe better to say two pieces of it.

On the one hand, there is Cat Valente's impassioned defense of traditional publishing over the freemium money-later model, where (in her purview) a few short-term gains are weak compensation for a long-term denaturing of publishing as a whole.

Then there is C.E. Murphy's notions ( Read more... )

How's this for a nyah-nyah duel? Amazon Vs. Macmillan, Round Three: Amazon caves and agrees to allow e-book pricing to be set much more competitively, but does so via an announcement worded for maximum acidity:

Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to ( Read more... )

The recent business with Amazon and Macmillan has been commented on in many places: Jim Hines and Cat Valente have their takes on it - I was especially annoyed with the way Amazon seems to be trying to spin this as a "database glitch". (Yes, they only meant to remove some Macmillan books and instead yanked all of them. Entirely by mistake. "And ( Read more... )

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The monetization paradox (or why Google is not my friend) - Charlie's Diary
... if I wanted to spend my time marketing my books I'd have gone into marketing. I'm a writer. Every hour spent on marketing activities is an hour spent not writing. Ditto editing, proofreading, commissioning cover art, and so on. This is what I have publishers for. It's ( Read more... )

Over at Jim Hines's LJ, there's been a fascinating thread about the economics of e-book piracy. Among the things that came out which didn't have direct bearing on the main topic was an observation I made about people who pirate anime chronically. Not just, say, episodes of a show not yet in general release, but who download tons and tons of the ( Read more... )