Here is the second ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon last month. I will be posting the final part in days to come. The first part can be found here.
Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conanmovie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar.
In this segment, we discuss piracy, e-book pricing, editing, and the “Storyteller’s Bowl” publishing model.
Me: Getting back to the thing you wrote about piracy, do you think anything major has changed since then?
Michael: I think that, looking more at piracy, that there are really two types of pirates. There is the pirate who’s out to make money. The pirate who grabs my stuff and puts it up on a for-pay site and is taking money and not paying me. And those guys, I will do anything I can to hunt them down and take their stuff. Because that’s basically what they’re doing to me. So that’s one set of pirates. There are mechanisms in place to go after them.
The other sort of pirates, recreational pirates if you will, are…the guys who go to a science fiction convention, they come to GenCon, and they hold up a thumb drive and say, "I’ve got 55,000 science fiction novels on this thumb drive! I’m king of the thumb drives!" And some other guy says, "Yeah? I got sixty on this one." And so the first guy now has got to go and find those other five thousand.
Me: And how many of them is he actually going to read?
Michael: He’s never going to read them, and he was never part of my target audience anyway. So his piracy, to collect in that sense, is like someone that collects marbles and diamonds because they’re all sparkly. They’re not collecting the diamonds for the value of the diamonds; they’re collecting them for something that we don’t value, for another part of its nature. So they’re not part of my economy.
Me: And there are also those who download works because they consider the prices being charged by publishers to be too high.
Michael: I think that piracy occurs when the asked-for value of something grossly exceeds the perceived value of something. Well, if what we’re asking for something is not grossly above its perceived value, if we’re giving bargain, dollar-for-dollar bargains, then pirates don’t have that justification that they think they’ve been ripped off in the past and now they’re going to get even.
I think the other thing that authors have to do and readers have to understand is that this really is a quid pro quo situation here. If you want to see more work by me, you have to pay me. If you like ice cream and you walk into Baskin Robbins, you don’t serve yourself, because that Baskin Robbins isn’t going to be there anymore. It can be the same way with me, that if I turn out a story you like and you want to see more of those stories, I do have to be paid.
Me: And moving from piracy to self-publishing, when you self-publish do you have your manuscripts edited by anybody?
Michael: It depends on the manuscript. For short stories, no, I’ll just do it myself. Part of the aspect of editing, at least for me, is longer work is harder to keep all in your mind all at the same time. So for me, a book of about 50, 60,000 words I can pretty much handle the editing job and I don’t need to go outside. That doesn’t mean I won’t have other people look it over, but I don’t feel constrained to hire and editor or ask friends of mine who are editors to do an edit job. For longer books, yeah, I do have editors go over the stuff. Absolutely.
Me: You have said that for pricing, you consider $6 or so to be the most reasonable price point?
Michael: I’m sort of feeling right now that six dollars is pretty much where I want to cap stuff for a single book. The only time that I would go higher is if I do an omnibus edition of something. Obviously, then you’re getting multiple books in one package. But I’m thinking, yeah, five or six bucks is pretty much the price range where I think it’s a fair exchange of value.
Me: It’s funny, you know, some people have done studies that suggest in some cases people are more likely to buy a book that’s $5 or $6 than they are to buy one that’s 99 cents, because of the feeling that you get what you pay for.
Michael: Absolutely. I just did a blog post on this. On pricing, the market is so new and there are so many variables that we have a hard time accounting for that any definitive word of what the best price is for anything is absurd. What I do know is there are some guys who are very comfortable putting stuff out at 99 cents. Other people think that $2.99 is the sweet spot. Other authors, myself included, I’ve not had any complaints at the $5 to $6 range. I think a smart author is going to have digital products whether it’s single stories, collections of short stories, novels, and omnibus versions that are ranging in price from 99 cents all the way to $10. That way, people can come, they can decide what they’re going to take as samples, you appeal to every budget.
Me: Have you been following any of the stuff that Joe Konrath is doing?
Michael: I’ve seen a lot of what he’s been doing, yes. Joe swears that $2.99 is the sweet spot. And I was not impressed with the methodology of the experiment that he ran to discover that that was the sweet spot. He’s certainly selling a lot of stuff, but I think that for me as a science fiction/fantasy author to compare my numbers to his numbers doesn’t make any sense. He’s writing in the mystery-thriller area which historically has always sold more and is more accessible. So I don’t think…until we’re able to nail down more of those variables, like where do we expect the sales from your genre, I think trying to get a holistic market view and trying to figure out where the equivalencies are is ridiculous.
Me: So, earlier this year, you reduced your target numbers for that book you were planning to write if enough people bought the first book. How is that project looking now?
Michael: I dropped the number in half. We’re at about the 40% mark. So probably we’re a year and a half out would be my guess in terms of getting people to sign on, but then again because the market is up, because the market is growing, it could be by Christmas that that stuff will all be eaten up.
Me: Have you seen the alternate price model that came to be called the "Storyteller’s Bowl" model that’s been used by a few authors where basically you write the work, post the first chapter, and then ask for donations. When the donations reach a certain amount you post the next one, and so forth.
Michael: That’s the busking for bucks model as Stephen King did with The Plant.
Me: The "pure" version of the model requires that the author actually have the work completed before he does this and held in escrow so people know they’ll get what they pay for.
Michael: Yeah, and here’s the thing that I don’t like about that particular model is that I personally don’t like buying a piece of something. I want the whole thing. Now that doesn’t mean that I’m averse to telling a story in serial format, like Cryptomancy which is the first collection of Trick Molloy stories that I did. Each story is a complete story in and of itself. They come together when I put them together as an episodic novel so if you get that collection of stories and start at the beginning and run to the end you’ve got a complete novel. You’ve got a growth arc for a character and all those sorts of things. So I’m certainly not averse to breaking that larger arc into smaller pieces, but I don’t want to sell somebody something that ends on a cliffhanger that they’re not going to know how it comes out, just because I would hate to buy that. And I don’t want my ability to get the rest of the story dependant upon what other people are going to do.
