Making a living with intellectual property
What's
the right way to make a living from intellectual property? Should
you give it all away for free and count on the kindness of strangers to
sustain you, or should you hold your output close to your chest and
demand payment for every iota? I've been pondering this issue as
I experiment with ebooks, and as I watch other creative types around me
follow very different paths.
On the one hand, there's
the old school approach, adhered to by some well
known authors. Over on our homesteading blog, I like to write up
a lunchtime
series
every week or so reviewing an interesting book, and I generally snag
photos off the internet to decorate the posts, citing them with a link
back to the source. A couple of the subjects of these series have
asked me to take images down, despite the fact that my posts send lots
of traffic their way (and definitely sell books, as I can tell from my
Amazon affiliate program). I have to admit that I think poorly of
those authors as a result, and am less inclined to buy their books.
At the other extreme, my brother
writes free software, not asking a penny for his labors.
I love his free software and use lots of it, but it didn't actually
occur to me until I started writing this post that I should put my
money where my mouth is and send the developers some cash. Even
now, I wouldn't really know where to start to support the dozens of
free programs I use on a daily basis.
I know
that if I didn't make any money on my ebooks, I'd write a lot fewer of
them and they'd be much less polished, which makes me feel that the
totally free approach is as bad for the public as for the
creators. As a result, I'm currently walking the middle
road. While I do charge 99
cents for my ebooks, I also post a quarter of each one on my blog where
anyone can read it. I give away free pdf copies to anyone who
emails me to ask for one, and I don't enable digital rights management
and do enable lending.
The technique seems to work well at selling books, but I'm still not
totally sure it's the ethical choice (thus this post.)
I'd be curious to hear
what others think about the issue of making a
living from intellectual property in the internet age. Do you use
an all-paid, all-free, or middle of the road approach?
Meanwhile, don't forget
to spend 99 cents to check out the
final volume in the Weekend Homesteader series, full of information on
planting an early spring garden, growing edible mushrooms, building a
compost pile, and attracting native pollinators. This will be my
last ebook for a while, but I'll be sure to let you know when the print
book comes out.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed.
Anna,
I think your middle of the road approach is a thoughtful one.
You and Mark make a high quality product... My favorite blog by a mile! The content and information you provide is in many ways far more valuable and up to date than the published "guides" out there, so you should charge for your labors.
But also, making some occasional things free and low-cost drives interest and more blog followers. Doing this too often however will have some people who would gladly pay you handsomely for your efforts wait and see if the thing will be free or discounted shortly.
And this may undermine the future value people see in your products.
The question is.... Are you currently financially sustainable? If not, what do you need to change about your system to make it so?
Warmly, Mac
Thanks for your kind words about the blog!
The middle of the road approach does seem to work very well from a financial standpoint. Since producing intellectual property costs next to nothing except time, it's much more feasible to give some small percentage of it away than it would be to give away chicken waterers.
I've been experimenting with this approach on Amazon for 10 months now, and the project brought in $3,955 in the first 9 months. (I don't have the data for this last month yet.) I figure I spent somewhere around 150 hours working on those ebooks, which comes to a bit over $26 per hour. Not bad considering that sales started out slow, but are now bringing in more than a thousand a month without any more writing and editing time.
I'm surprised by how few people take me up on my free ebook offers, actually. I think that when you price the books at 99 cents, just about everyone is willing to plunk down the cash.
That said, we do still count on our chicken waterers for the majority of our income.