Pay Now or Pay Later?17 November 2003 I'm thinking seriously about trying out two of the concepts I brought up a couple weeks ago: a serial of short stories with integrated annotations. When I wrote my first novel, I had an email group of dozen friends that got each chapter as it was written, and it gave the writing process a speed and passion I haven't really felt since. The readers enjoyed it, too, and eagerly awaited the next installment. I really believe ebooks are a great way to recapture in "print" the excitement and suspense of old movie serials and even modern TV shows (if I can work my readers into the same lather that I got from Babylon 5, I'll have more than done my job). That said, I gotta eat, too, and retail technology sales isn't the big money glamorous world that people think it is. If I'm going to spend this much of my time writing this story, I want to be paid. So what's the best way to do that? What I'm attempting here isn't quite the same as "normal" ebooks. The individual books are smaller, really more like short stories (about as much plot as a TV episode; hey, I'm a child of the tube). They're going to be written and published on a regular, ongoing basis. Even the standards of ebook pricing and distribution don't quite fit here. My first thought was to follow in the footsteps of a former brainchild of mine, now defunct: Free-ePress. Rob Spalding and I founded Free-ePress in 1999 as an attempt to sell ebooks on the honor system, rewarding authors similar to how passersby reward street performers. Ebooks were downloadable free, without encryption or required payment, and readers were encouraged to return and throw the author a PayPal donation if they enjoyed the book. Free-ePress was a dismal failure, but I'm still not convinced the core concept was flawed. It had two strikes against it from the outset. One, we started when ebooks were far less established than they are now (and even now most of the customers I talk to at the store have no idea ebooks exist), and two, we had to rely on people reading a one-shot story and then coming back to our site to pay a donation. Add that level of effort to the fact that we started in the heyday of Napster and free music (legalities aside), and it's hardly a wonder almost nobody paid. Now, however, ebooks are more established and gaining ground. Palm Digital Media and Fictionwise are adding new titles every day. Even inexpensve PDAs now come with high-resolution screens suitable for long-term reading. Ebooks might work better now than before, but I'd still have the problem of getting people to donate after they've downloaded and read the story. How do you make people come back to pay? We could never figure this out with Free-ePress, even though the answer was staring us in the face. One of our most successful titles at Free-ePress was Erik Skorpen's MTR series, a series of short stories following two sisters that owned a struggling interstellar transport business and the mysterious rogue they hired to be their pilot. The stories were entertaining, the characters well-written and engaging and the ongoing story arc was developing nicely. MTR got a lot of downloads, but few payments. I think the reason for this was two-fold. One, Erik was writing MTR in his spare time, of which he had little. Consequently, the new installments were released on a haphazard schedule and readers never knew when to expect the next one. Two, we didn't make payment as easy as we could have. Since then, PayPal has implemented PayPal Donate buttons (as seen on this very website) that probably would have helped a great deal if they had been placed on the main MTR web page where people came back to find the latest installment. And if they knew that the next installment would be posted on the first of every month, they'd be more likely to come back to read the next one. (Conversely, if we'd had an opt-in system where downloaders could leave their email addresses, we could have emailed them to let them know when the next installment was ready.) I'm not sure donationware is the right way to go, however. I've had PayPal donate buttons on this site for over a year, and I've seen a whopping $40, enough to cover my hosting costs for two months. Clay Shirky, one of the smartest people I know in regards to how things actually work on the Internet, thinks donations are far more workable than micropayments, but one of the reasons he uses is that the "mental transaction costs", the amount of effort it takes to pay for something, is too high for micropayments. I'm not sure it's any lower for donations, and with serialized content there's also the procrastination "I'll get you next time" effect to consider. A lot of readers may mean to pay, but just never get around to it. Scott McCloud disagrees with Shirky and thinks micropayments is an idea whose time has finally come. While FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar and other micropayment systems have long since fallen by the wayside, McCloud has high hopes for BitPass as the payment system for his online comic, The Right Number. BitPass works like the micropayment systems that preceded it. The first time you try to buy something that uses BitPass, you're requested to sign up for an account. You deposit money ($5, say) in that account and then money is debited from that account when you buy stuff that uses BitPass. Each issue of The Right Number costs 25 cents, so you'd have enough in your BitPass account to buy 20 issues before you'd have to refill it. The first time you buy something, there's the overhead of setting up an account, but after that you just click and download your content. I think McCloud may be on to something here that Shirky has missed. When Shirky talks about mental transaction costs, he's talking about deciding for each piece of content if it's worth what the author/publisher is charging. Is it worth ten cents to read pamphlet giving ten reasons why it's a good idea to start a business now? Would each reason be worth a penny? But what Shirky's missing here is that with serialized content, be they comics or short stories, that choice gets progressively easier to make the deeper one gets into the story. Once a micropayment account is set up and the reader is already "hooked" on the ongoing story, paying for the next installment should literally be a no-brainer. There was a time I had cable TV just to see the final season of Babylon 5, which was only broadcast on TNT. After watching 88 episodes over four years, there was no question that I would watch the fifth and final season. Shirky also talks a lot about giving away content for free, with no expectation of remuneration (or with voluntary donations, as discussed above). The idea is that free is an "evolutionarily stable" model. It works to competitive advantage when others are charging money, and it works when others are giving content away for free, since they can't be any "free-er" than free. In this case, I think the paranoia generated by the RIAA and MPAA (anyone else sick of those pre-movie guilt-trip spots in the theater yet?) might actually work for creators. The message is slowly getting out that creators should be paid for their work. While I don't doubt that there are still millions that download ebooks, movies and music for free, honest, average Americans are starting to realize that intellectual property infringement (I still can't bring myself to call it "theft") is frowned upon. I think this is a big part of the reason why Apple's iTunes Music Store is doing so well. They're selling millions upon millions of songs at a buck a song. Yes, people could choose to get the same songs for free elsewhere, but for whatever reason, they're choosing to pay for them. Which brings me to Fictionwise. Not only is Fictionwise doing booming business, but they offer tons of unencrypted titles (which, to the consternation of big print publishers, sell rings around the DRM-secured titles) and they got their start selling short fiction with micropayments. Fictionwise's MicroPay system works flawlessly and their website is designed to make it easy to find ebooks of a certain genre, author, or user rating. They even sell ebook versions of magazines and have a system in place to let readers know by email when a new issue is released. Would Fictionwise be the ideal venue for selling serial fiction? I don't know, but I'm leaning in that direction. Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! |