Some other writers have decided that their readers are thieves and pirates, and they devote countless hours to systematically alienating their customers. These writers will go broke. Not me—I love you people. Copy the hell out of this thing.

Medium Term

There may well be a time between the sunset of printed text and the appearance of robust models for unfettered distribution of electronic text, an interregnum during which the fortunes of novelists follow those of poets and playwrights and other ink-stained scribblers whose industries have cratered beneath them.

When that happens, writerly income will come from incidental sources such as paid speaking engagements and commissioned articles. No, it’s not “fair” that novelists who are good speakers will have a better deal than novelists who aren’t, but neither was it fair that the era of radio gave a boost to the career of artists who played well in the studios, nor that the age of downloading is giving a boost to the careers of artists who play well live. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. I’m an sf writer: it’s my job to love the future.

My chances of landing speaking gigs, columns, paid assignments, and the rest of it are all contingent on my public profile. The more people there are that have read and enjoyed my work, the more of these gigs I’ll get. And giving away books increases your notoriety a whole lot more than clutching them to your breast and damning the pirates.

So there you have it: I’m giving these books away to sell more books, to find out more about the market and to increase my profile so that I can land speaking and columnist gigs. Not because I’m some patchouli-scented, fuzzy-headed, “information wants to be free” info-hippie. I’m at it because I want to fill my bathtub with money and rub my hands and laugh and laugh and laugh.

Developing nations

A large chunk of “ebook piracy” (downloading unauthorized ebooks from the net) is undertaken by people in the developing world, where the per-capita GDP can be less than a dollar a day. These people don’t represent any kind of commercial market for my books. No one in Burundi is going to pay a month’s wages for a copy of this book. A Ukrainian film of this book isn’t going to compete with box-office receipts in the Ukraine for a Hollywood version, if one emerges. No one imports commercial editions of my books into most developing nations, and if they did. they’d be priced out of the local market. 

 Prev. P 3/295 next