“The market and the internet don’t care if you make money.”
posted by Dave Hoffman
Via Andrew Sullivan I came across this really angry comment about the future of book publishing. In it, Seth Godin (Tribes) argues that the book industry needs to adapt – quickly – from being a bunch of people who print and sell books to a group of “marketers and agents and managers and developers of content”. Sounds like a cinch. I wonder why newspapers haven’t thought of that.
Godin continues that maybe publishers should consider selling books for a dollar, because the audience will purchase them at that price, and let authors make money from “bespoke work and appearances and interactions”. (That means, I think, personalized books written on demand for particular groups. I imagine Godin has read The Diamond Age more the once. If you haven’t, you should, even though it retails at $10.20 new.)
I don’t know enough about the economics of the book industry, and I’m trying to learn more. But I wanted to focus for a moment on Godin’s argument (noted in the title to this post) that content providers shouldn’t feel entitled to monetizing their talent, simply because they are creating a product that people want. Very true. That said, it is also worth pointing out that entrepreneurs probably won’t create until they see a path to making a living from their work. The Grateful Dead model – appearances & interactions – appears to me to be an audacious hope, not a business model. Or to put it another way, if I were a budding author reading Godin’s interview, I would put down my pen and go to law school. At least we’ve got a Guild to protect us from the forces of modernization.
(Image Source: Ezra Cornell’s Book, Wikicommons)
November 9, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, Cyberlaw, Economic Analysis of Law, Google & Search Engines, Law School
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Responses (9)
Frank - November 9, 2008 at 10:01 pm
I favor a model like Terry Fisher lays out for music (in “Promises to Keep”), for all media. And why not a new WPA for magazines and books? Send out authors to document America–could be like the Federal Art Project:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Art_Project
Moz - November 9, 2008 at 10:15 pm
There’s no way I’d pay even a dollar to see my favourite author live. I hope you’ve heard the Monty Python skit to that effect.
Musicians are different – broadly what you get on a recording is something they do live, but subtly different. So when I see a musician live I’m seeing what they do. With an author, I’m seeing someone who writes well in private… interacting with the public. Frank Zappa springs to mind, it is very much dancing about architecture.
seth godin - November 10, 2008 at 6:58 am
In trying to summarize a decade’s work for a short interview, I’m afraid I wasn’t clear enough.
“The market doesn’t care if you make money” is the precise answer to your complaint that this isn’t a great business model for most authors, publishers and journalists, or that it would be difficult. So what? The market doesn’t care.
I am working hard to practice what I preach, and I can say that (so far) it seems to be working.
A.J. Sutter - November 10, 2008 at 12:21 pm
SG’s advice reminds me of something I heard an engineering prof say in 1971 or 1972: “If you’re good, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” It’s not quite so simple.
“Because generally, when you do something for an audience, they repay you. The Grateful Dead made plenty of money. Tom Peters makes many millions of dollars a year giving speeches….”: This is Hollywood Economics reasoning: reasoning from hits. Though SG obviously is fortunate enough to enjoy it for now, this isn’t the situation enjoyed by the vast majority of authors. Of course, maybe one could reason ex post, and say that their inability to make a living from some sideline to their books shows that the market doesn’t care about them, either, much as one could tell all the engineers whose jobs were outsourced that none of them were ever that “good” to begin with. But I for one would be rather upset if I my reading choices were narrowed down to “good” authors such as SG, Tom Peters and ilk, to say nothing of bestselling writers in fiction and poetry, if any.
Of course, my choice would be broader than that, because authors would give away their ideas for free on the Internet. Right. Well, #1, many of them do already, in blogs, but honestly who’s got time to wade through all the blogs that might be interesting? (Maybe you do, but I don’t; I write for a living.) A bookstore is a much more efficient search. #2, books enable a sustained argument in a way that a blog cannot (and that most business books don’t attempt to). #3, a typical author isn’t going to be able to invest the time in such a sustained argument if he or she can’t get paid for it. That’s not so much a matter of “incentive” as a basic fact about keeping bread on the table while having time and space for reflection. I speak as someone who’s had to rely to writing books and articles as my sole source of income (aside from my spouse’s salary) for the past year and a half, while waiting to be licensed to practice law where I currently live. The writing might benefit my law practice going forward, but during that time it could not. Yes, authors care more about compensation than about copies sold. But in most cases, the two are going to be tied to each other, unless publishers are much more generous with their advances to lesser-known and unknown authors. (I ignore for now the arguments in favor of hard-copy books, as allowing a more private imaginative space and, when combined with a pencil and an eraser, facilitating dialogue with the book and its ideas. Not to mention the freedom to be oblivious to loss of Internet connectivity in Tokyo subway tunnels.)
There’s also a more troubling theme in this reasoning. Namely, that what “the market” wants now is the best validation for intellectual product. It’s very similar to the misconception that democracy simply equals elections and majority rule. A key element of democracy is that it protects the rights of the minority, including the right to be heard. Publishing hasn’t always been so dominated by market-based thinking; for many decades its business model respected free speech principles. Bestsellers supported poor sellers. Even in recent times, some publishers in Europe publish translations of books by Nobel laureates in literature because they feel it’s their duty to do so, notwithstanding low sales figures. For a description of an older example of this philosophy, see Herman Ullstein’s terrific memoir, The Rise and Fall of the House of Ullstein (1943). In the 1980s, US publishers underwent an MBA-driven conversion to an “every book a profit center” mentality, well-described by André Schiffrin (2001). (BTW, neither Ullstein’s nor Schiffrin’s book is still in print.) Publishers are already struggling with the consequences of their neoliberal conversion; SG seems to want them to become even more fundamentalist. He may be right that the “market doesn’t care,” but why should that settle the matter, or be the only relevant concern for publishers or society? Maybe society should find another way to address this problem; see, e.g., the approaches discussed in R. Alberto & al., Le livre: que faire? (2008), including, among other suggestions, various forms of public assistance to publishers or writers.
My point here isn’t so much to advocate a welfare program as to point out that demanding that authors and intellectual products severally (as in jointly vs. severally) sink or swim in “the market” is a very particular choice that a society can make, not some kind of natural inevitability. As a successful marketing guru, SG can afford to believe in the reductio ad absurdum of market rule in matters of culture and intellectual ferment. But neither most authors nor, whether it knows it or not, society at large can afford to share that belief.
Seth Finkelstein - November 10, 2008 at 3:23 pm
What A.J Sutter said.
I have grown so tired of hearing popular marketers blather that the solution is for everyone to be a popular marketer, just like them.
WHAT ABOUT PEOPLE WHO DON’T WANT TO BE POPULAR MARKETERS?
If they have no answer beyond “The market …”, then I wish they’d admit they have nothing to say beyond the trivial, rather than pretending ii’s somehow profound.
Seth Finkelstein - November 10, 2008 at 3:23 pm
What A.J Sutter said.
I have grown so tired of hearing popular marketers blather that the solution is for everyone to be a popular marketer, just like them.
WHAT ABOUT PEOPLE WHO DON’T WANT TO BE POPULAR MARKETERS?
If they have no answer beyond “The market …”, then I wish they’d admit they have nothing to say beyond the trivial, rather than pretending it’s somehow profound.
James Grimmelmann - November 11, 2008 at 4:47 pm
If the market doesn’t care whether authors get paid, and we want there to be authors, doesn’t that imply that we should change the rules of the market? That’s Intellectual Property 101, whether your point is that we should change the rules to favor authors more or to favor them less.
Frank - November 11, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Ah, but James, don’t you realize the market is a prepolitical, natural order that should not be muddled by those who’d ignore the spontaneous order it generates?
A.J. Sutter - November 11, 2008 at 10:33 pm
With all appropriate deference to Frank’s profound insight, may I offer another response to James: why do you assume that changing the rules of the market will be sufficient to change things? For example, mightn’t social, political and ethical values also be relevant to these issues? (Hint: yes.)
There’s also a rhetorical aspect that may steer people to talk past each other, and here I think Frank’s satirical comment is helpful. Godin’s metaphor is that “the market doesn’t care” — i.e. THE MARKET IS A PERSON (here I use the typographical style of the “cognitive linguistic” approach to metaphor, e.g. Lakoff & Johnson, without necessarily endorsing all their mishugas). James’s metaphor is of changing the rules of the market, which is more like THE MARKET IS A GAME, THE MARKET IS A PROCESS, or some other constructed thing, and quite different from a person or something natural. If you view the world through SG’s metaphor or something close to it, the “implication” to change the rules won’t necessarily follow.
And finally, to maintain my quota of curmudgeonly remarks, may I note BTW that for “IP 101″ to be talking about markets at all is very particular to time and space. It wasn’t in the course 25 years ago. It’s not necessarily there now outside “Anglo-Saxon” pedagogy. Of course, evolution hasn’t always taught in in high school biology courses, either; nor has intelligent design: being new isn’t necessarily an improvement.
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