Over the past few years, I have not been devouring books like I once did. Mainly, because I absorb and reshape so much online content on a day-to-day basis, that the idea of leisure time reading now seems other than leisurely to me. Which is lame. Thankfully, I fixed the lameness for a time this week, when I cracked open Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson, and kept reading until I got to his last, and most important, sentence of the book: “Free may be the best price, but it can’t be the only one.”
There are lots of interesting places in Anderson’s text to focus. One I’d like to address in more detail here is something Anderson calls “The Penny Gap,” which is a pricing model that changes the score.
“There are really two markets: free and everything else. And the difference between the two is profound,” Anderson argues. “If you charge a price, any price, we are forced to ask ourselves if we really want to open our wallets. But if the price is zero, that flag never goes up.”
Anderson’s book is well researched and offers lots of economic theory. In his “Penny Gap” section, Anderson points to George Washington University economist Nick Szabo and his ideas on “mental transaction costs.” Szabo looked at micropayments and claimed that such systems are “destined to fail,” because the cognitive costs are too high. Or as NYU professor Clay Shirky said, “In a world of free content, even the moderate hassle of micropayments greatly damages user preference, and increases their willingness to accept free material as a substitute.”
All of which is a terrific argument to go ahead and charge a fair price for one’s paid offerings.
I started charging for my weekly email newsletter in March and set the opening price at $1.00/month, or a quarter per issue. Is that price too low? It’s not too high. I chose one dollar because that’s the cost of a song in the iTunes store, and something that’s very easy to agree to, but what I’ve learned is price isn’t the issue when charging for online content. The issue is getting people to agree to pay at all.
So here’s what I’m willing to do to boost circulation. During the month of July, you can subscribe to Hungry for Gumbo for free. Your subscription will last the life of the newsletter. Simply send me an email (db at davidburn dot com) asking for the free subscription and I’ll sign you up. If you don’t like receiving the newsletter you can always unsubscribe, which is also free.
How does this motivate you to pay me for my writing? It doesn’t. But it may motivate you to share my writing with others who will pay.
I’ve been tossing around the idea that my writing, editing and publishing “isn’t about me, it’s about you,” for some time now, and I have to admit it’s a tricky concept to wrap my head around.
The academic view is that writers, editors and publishers are people with something to say. But the definition is a lot looser when you ask people in marketing and media to weigh in on the ancient art of storytelling. Marketing and media people like to see storytellers as community guides or content shamans.
Programming instructor and game developer, Kathy Sierra, guest writing on Gaping Void, describes the need bloggers have to cater to their audience:
You do not want to be the guy that must ask constantly, “how can I get more comments on my blog? how can I get more followers and fans?†The real pixie dust is when you ask yourself, “how can I help my users get more comments on THEIR blog?â€. You want to be the guy who asks, “How can I help my users get more followers and fans?†And that is why I have always been such a fan of Hugh and Gary V and Tim Ferris, for example.
So it’s all about empowering the reader. That’s not hard to understand, unless you think about it for a minute…
Forget social media. Do great writers seek to empower their readers? Is that what Melville was doing with Moby Dick? Is that what Hemingway was doing with The Old Man And The Sea? Yes, the readers of these classics walked away from the book a better person for having read it–that’s central to the value exchange between writer and reader. But we’re talking about authorial intent. Was the intent to make their readers more popular, more well spoken, more knowledgeable? I have a hard time believing that. I think it’s much more likely that Melville, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Vonnegut and all the rest intended to tell a timeless tale.
I get that it is up to the writer to provide the canvas, the brushes and the paint so you, dear reader, can paint a picture. Where the logic falls apart for me is realizing that not that many of my readers, or yours, have their own blog or want to toot their own horn. They’re readers–people who like to consider, not reblog, the information presented. In other words, digital production and distribution of content has changed the game, but the fundamentals of storytelling remain.
Bottom line, there’s a difference between writers using story to connect with an audience and a marketer using story to connect with customers. I’m still working out just exactly what the differences are, but intent is a big one. Marketers intend to sell, and are judged by their abilities to sell, not by mastery of dialogue, suspense or plot. I know we all have to sell to survive, but writers first need something to sell and that something is the product of long and lonely hours–the very opposite of social.
I just read some devastatingly good advice from one writer to another. It concerns one writer’s jealous nature, as she witnesses her peers get the book deals that are not coming her way.
I know it’s not easy being an artist. I know the gulf between creation and commerce is so tremendously wide that it’s sometimes impossible not to feel annihilated by it. A lot of artists give up because it’s just too damn hard to go on making art in a culture that by and large does not support its artists. But the people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity. They’ve taken into their hearts the idea that there is enough for all of us, that success will manifest itself in different ways for different sorts of artists, that keeping the faith is more important than cashing the check, that being genuinely happy for someone else who got something you hope to get makes you genuinely happier too.
Most of those people did not come to this perspective naturally. And so, Awful Jealous Person, there is hope for you. You, too, can be a person who didn’t give up. Most of the people who didn’t give up realized that in order to thrive they had to dismantle the ugly jealous god in their heads so they could instead serve something greater: their own work.
I would say something about how perfect this line of thinking is, but there’s no need. The only need I see is to look inside and make sure that any ego-fed emotions are put in check so inspiration can travel at will.
Amazon.com’s top 50 digital best-seller list featured 15 books priced at $5 or less last Wednesday afternoon. Louisville businessman John Locke, for example, a part-time thriller writer whose signature series features a former CIA assassin, claimed seven of those titles, all priced at 99 cents.
According to The Wall Street Journal, as digital sales surge, publishers are casting a worried eye towards the previously scorned self-published market. Unlike five years ago, when self-published writers rarely saw their works on the same shelf as the industry’s biggest names, the low cost of digital publishing, coupled with Twitter and other social-networking tools, has enabled previously unknown writers to make a splash.
“When I saw that highly successful authors were charging $9.99 for an e-book, I thought that if I can make a profit at 99 cents, I no longer have to prove I’m as good as them,” says Locke. “Rather, they have to prove they are ten times better than me.”
Locke earns 35 cents for every title he sells at 99 cents. Amazon pays all authors who use Kindle Direct Publishing, the retailer’s independent publishing service, a royalty rate of 35% on digital titles priced below $2.99, and 70% on e-books priced between $2.99 and $9.99. Altogether, Locke says his publishing revenue amounted to $126,000 from Amazon in March alone.
“Frankly, a writer should be a hero of consciousness.” -Jim Harrison
In 1986, novelist and poet Jim Harrison entertained Jim Fergus, an interviewer from The Paris Review, at his Michigan farm over a period of five days. Harrison was busy bird hunting and preparing elaborate meals for his guests, but he made room to talk shop. In my mind, Harrison is plain brilliant, so to “hear” him speak in this interview is a special treat. I’m especially impressed with how he continually offers up what Rilke, Rimbaud and other poets had to say on any given subject.
I’m also interested in what Harrison had to say in ’86 on “the business” of his writing. “The first seventeen years of our marriage we averaged less than ten grand a year,” he says.
Curiously, things kept going downhill. I would get cheated on the most minor little screenplay. I’d write one for money and then they wouldn’t pay me. These things kept happening. My older daughter is still angry about what we went through, and I must admit I am occasionally. But there’s nothing unique about it, and all it does is make you enormously cynical. At the end of that ghastly time I met Jack Nicholson on the set of McGuane’s movie, The Missouri Breaks. We got talking and he asked me if I had one of my novels with me, and I had one, I think it was Wolf. He read it and enjoyed it. He told me that if I ever got an idea for him, to call him up. Well, I never have any of those ideas. I wasn’t even sure what he meant. I think he said later that I was the only one he ever told that to who never called. A year afterwards, I was out in L.A. and he called up and asked me to go to a movie. It was really pleasant, and I was impressed with his interest in every art form. It was right after Cuckoo’s Nest and all these people tried to swarm all over him after the movie. Anyway, later he heard I was broke and he thought it was unseemly. So he rigged up a deal so that I could finish the book I had started, which was Legends of the Fall.
I love how Jack–who Harrison calls “an extraordinary person, really literate and intensely perceptive”–thought Harrison’s poverty unseemly. The power of a benefactor is as potent today, as ever.
Further along in the interview, Harrison is asked if he feels any pressure to write the Big Book? “I feel absolutely no pressure of any kind,” he says. “People don’t realize how irrational and decadent an act of literature is in the first place, and to feel pressure in a literary sense is hopeless.”
The Paris Review is an amazing publication. And now that its interview archives are available for free on the web, it’s an astounding digital resource for writers and fans of literature.
Would you like to hear about the craft of writing from the likes of William Carlos Williams, Evelyn Waugh, John Steinbeck, E.B. White, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, E. M. Forster, Frank O’Connor, William Styron, Dorothy Parker and so on? Of course you would and it’s all there for the reading, thanks to the work and generosity of the literary magazine’s writer’s, editors and publishers (past and present).
I just read a 1956 Paris Review interview with William Faulkner and learned a lot about the author in the process. His answers are matter of fact, and I imagine they’re a good reflection of his personality. Thankfully, his answers are also funny. For instance, let’s look at his answer regarding how he became a writer…
I was living in New Orleans, doing whatever kind of work was necessary to earn a little money now and then. I met Sherwood Anderson. We would walk about the city in the afternoon and talk to people. In the evenings we would meet again and sit over a bottle or two while he talked and I listened. In the forenoon I would never see him. He was secluded, working. The next day we would repeat. I decided that if that was the life of a writer, then becoming a writer was the thing for me. So I began to write my first book. At once I found that writing was fun. I even forgot that I hadn’t seen Mr. Anderson for three weeks until he walked in my door, the first time he ever came to see me, and said, “What’s wrong? Are you mad at me?†I told him I was writing a book. He said, “My God,†and walked out. When I finished the book—it was Soldier’s Pay—I met Mrs. Anderson on the street. She asked how the book was going, and I said I’d finished it. She said, “Sherwood says that he will make a trade with you. If he doesn’t have to read your manuscript he will tell his publisher to accept it.†I said, “Done,†and that’s how I became a writer.
Faulkner also had a certain ruthlessness and mono-focus about him. According to him that’s what a writer needs to get the job done.
The writer doesn’t need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper. I’ve never known anything good in writing to come from having accepted any free gift of money. The good writer never applies to a foundation. He’s too busy writing something. If he isn’t first rate he fools himself by saying he hasn’t got time or economic freedom. Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don’t have time to bother with success or getting rich. Success is feminine and like a woman; if you cringe before her, she will override you. So the way to treat her is to show her the back of your hand. Then maybe she will do the crawling.
I know it’s hard to skip over the misogyny in this last bit of commentary from the famous Southern writer. But there is power in what he said, if not in how he said it. Wanting fame or fortune isn’t going to deliver the manuscript. Manuscripts are written by tough people who refuse to quit or be distracted from the ultimate goal, which is the finished work, published or not.
[UPDATE] In a 1986 Paris Review interview with Jim Harrison, the interviewer says, “Faulkner once said that nothing could ruin a first-rate talent, to which Norman Mailer replied that Faulkner made more asinine remarks than any other major American novelist.” Harrison then says, “Except for Mailer. I think Faulkner was always defensive and he gave Chinese answers.”
“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” -Muriel Rukeyser
Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly is the author or What Technology Wants, and several other books. To my knowledge he doesn’t call himself a futurist, but he is one, and one of the best.
Writing on his blog, he images new futures for books that are interesting to consider. Let’s look at a small slice of what Kelly sees on the horizon:
Today the paper pages of a book are disappearing. What is left in their place is the conceptual structure of a book — a bunch of text united by a theme into an experience that takes a while to complete.
…What books have always wanted was to be annotated, marked up, underlined, dog-eared, summarized, cross-referenced, hyperlinked, shared, and talked-to. Being digital allows them to do all that and more.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t need any more distractions from the text. Yet, I hesitate to criticize this form that Kelly imagines because a more social book may, in fact, be a better experience of the work.
In a 1993 Paris Review interview with Ken Kesey, the great American novelist said, “The novel is a noble, classic form but it doesn’t have the juice it used to. If Shakespeare were alive today he’d be writing soap opera, daytime TV, or experimenting with video.”
At the time of the interview, digital books were only a rumor, but today they’re fast becoming commonplace. The question is will advances in technology help makes books even more compelling than they already are? Amazon and its competitors are certainly believers.
[UPDATE] According to Los Angeles Times, sales of e-books reached $90 million in February — more than tripling the number from a year earlier. Last summer, online retailer Amazon.com Inc. said sales of e-books for its Kindle reader had far eclipsed hardcover book sales, noting at the time that it had been selling e-books for only a little more over two years and had been selling paper books since 1995.
On Friday, Darby and I took a trip to Eugene to celebrate Ken Kesey Day. We looked at old photos and other artifacts including Kesey’s prison journal (he served six months for a marijuana bust). We attended a reading where University of Oregon scholars read passages from unpublished works by Kesey and finally we attended the west coast premier of The Magic Trip, a new documentary film that restores original footage shot in 1964 by Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on their journey from La Honda, California to New York City and back in the DayGlo-painted bus called “Further.”
It’s an extraordinary film, and a major achievement in editing by the filmmakers, Alex Gibney and Allison Ellwood. The Pranksters shot some 100 hours of footage on their coast-to-coast jaunt, but their audio and video rarely synced up (and there were other technical issues to address, as well). I’d say Gibney and Ellwood hit a home run, because the film is truly immersive. In fact, Ellwood said after the screening that she felt like she could smell the fumes from the bus at times.
Of course, many in the audience, myself included, were already familiar with the story. Tom Wolfe laid it out for all to see in his book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It’s also the stuff of legend in Grateful Dead circles. Be that as it may, actually seeing the characters and hearing them is a gift. Finally, we have a sense for what it’s like to ride along with Neal Cassady at the wheel. We see the camaraderie between Ken Babbs and Kesey and other relationship dynamics (for instance, Kesey, or Swashbuckler to use his Prankster name, “steals” George Walker’s girlfriend after she gets on the bus in New York). The film also provides a great look at another time in America. Hippies did not yet exist in 1964, so while the Pranksters drew lots of curious onlookers, most had warm smiles on their faces. In other words, the American people were not scared by the Pranksters’ strangeness. That would come later, when the media, and other powers that be, enacted a smear campaign against free-thinking, freedom loving Americans.
There’s a passage in the film when Kesey talks about a writer needing to enjoy the process of writing a book, because the culmination of that process–the publishing part–isn’t much fun. It is worth noting that the idea to make this “travel film” was an attempt by Kesey to move beyond the confines of format. After all, his first two novels were huge literary successes. Why not push Further into another, more modern storytelling medium? That the Pranksters were filmmakers didn’t seem to matter to them. What mattered was the adventure and the pursuit.
That the group would manufacture its own drama was a given. Take Stark Naked–one Prankster who got a bit too high and wandered off into Larry McMurtry’s middle-class Houston neighborhood wrapped only in a blanket. She was picked up by the police and put into the psych ward. A friend from San Francisco had to come get her and take her home. Meanwhile, the Pranksters were unwittingly integrating a “colored” beach at Lake Pontchartrain, inadvertently leaving Babbs’ brother behind in Georgia, freaking Jack Kerouac out at a party in Manhattan and showing up at Tim Leary’s, where they failed to be welcomed except for the graciousness of Richard Alpert, a.k.a. Ram Daas.
As a literary device, I think the bus can be likened to Huck Finn’s raft. When the raft is the water, everybody’s safe and happy–that’s what going with the flow brings. When the raft pulls into harbor, trouble can ensue. That Kesey was made to serve time for a pot bust shortly after the bus trip culminated is an example of this. But even in the face of jail time, he managed to keep a positive outlook and he came out of the experience recommitted to his family and the work to be done at home in Oregon.
When Wolfe asked Kesey why he didn’t want to write anymore, Kesey said he’d “rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.” Kesey also said, “When people ask me what my greatest work is, it’s the bus. And they say, ‘Why the bus?’ It’s because the bus is a living piece of art where you’re out with the people and it’s happening right now, whereas writing, which is good, is removed.” Despite these sentiments, Kesey did continue to write. He also taught creative writing at U of O. In 1993, he published his third novel, Sailor Song, that may not reach the exalted heights of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, but it is a very good book, nevertheless.
After the film last night, the filmmakers were joined on stage by Kesey biographer, Robert Faggen, and by Pranksters Mountain Girl, Ed McClanahan and George Walker. Walker, dressed in a DayGlo jumpsuit and Cat in the Hat tophat was the liveliest of the bunch, but all seemed to delight in the moment. The events in the movie happened 47 years ago, but the need to remember those events and the thoughts that created them and flowed from them are as important as ever. Personally, I feel reinvigorated to push for higher ground. For me that means getting my “real writer, not ad writer” self moving in the right direction again. For others it could mean just about anything. Anything, that is, that has to do with stretching oneself to be more compassionate, more vital and more involved. Kesey once said, “If it doesn’t uplift the human heart, piss on it.”
Note:University of Oregon is seeking funds to help purchase the Ken Kesey Collection and keep it in its current home, the UO Knight Library, as Kesey wished.
Host Courtenay Hameister’s conversation with Harvard-educated Rauch was, for me, the best part of the show. Rauch is an impressive man doing unbelievable work in Ashland. I’ve only been to one play in Ashland thus far, but I’m motivated to go back for many more. Rauch spoke eloquently about the need to support the arts and he’s right. Art creates culture. He also provided some perspective on the uniqueness of Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which annually produces eleven plays on three stages during a season that lasts from February to October. OSF is the largest company of actors in the U.S. and Rauch reminded the audience that all classic plays were once new plays given birth in the nurturing environment of repertory theater. OSF is committed to the production of new plays under Rauch’s guidance and I’m excited to know that the power of live theater is alive and well in Southern Oregon (and that the ripples made there reach far out to other lands).
Here’s a look at Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2011 season:
To download past episodes of Live Wire! Radio, visit the show’s iTunes podcast catalog.
By the way, members of the audience are asked to submit haikus on pre-determined topics and the cast then chooses a handful of them to read aloud during the performance. Darby’s haiku was not chosen, but she’s got a talent for the short form.
Geek Love invites us
to hula hoops and freak shows
Please show me your tail
I did not turn a haiku on a given topic in to one of the designated haiku hotties, but maybe I can make up for it here.
I’m starting a new email newsletter for paid subscribers. No, I have not gone mad, I’m merely inspired to pursue various strategies that pay me to write, edit and publish.
Why would you want to invite me into your inbox like this? And why would I bother to charge for the content and effort needed to create it?
My hope is you’ll invite me in and pay me to return again and again because you, like me, like to have a finger on the cultural pulse, a.k.a. the zeitgeist (and you want it served up in an easy-to-carry package that saves you time and the hassle of preparation).
As for the nerve it takes to charge you–even a token like my introductory rate of $1/month–I’m looking forward to the pressure the paid model creates. When you pay me, I owe you more and more kernels of meaning and wit. Simple as that.
My friend and personal ombudsman, Tom Asacker, advised me earlier this week to find what my audience on AdPulp.com is hungry for and feed them. We discussed some good ideas that are currently simmering before being plated. Perhaps I’ll create more paid newsletters that feed those hungers too, but I want to start here, with “Hungry for Gumbo,” because I’m more than a marketer who serves a highly defined audience hungry for one thing like steak, or fish, or whatever.
I’m a writer and I like gumbo, literally and figuratively.
Interestingly, the email format also lends itself to a more intimate relationship with readers. Email is digital content that can be shared/spread, but it’s provided in a private, one-on-one setting. In other words it can be a place for “loose talk,” in a way that a Web site with comments is not.
