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Other interpretations
At graduation yesterday the class valedictorian, a journalism major, gave a first-rate address. In it, the speaker charged journalists with making complex subjects accessible to people who have just a few minutes to spend catching up on them.
He didn’t talk about the people who write headlines.
Both groups came to mind when I read a Fast Company profile of a book that jumped to the top of the charts on Amazon. Its authors had deliberately pirated their own book and let it proliferate as PDFs shared across the internet.
It’s an interesting story, one that challenges the notion that free distribution is antithetical to paid sales. But it is a long way away from “exploding the old publishing model.”
First, in publishing, “free” is not “new.” Book publishers have long used free content - galleys, blads, ARCs, sample chapters and the like - to entice the trade to stock books and to encourage people to buy them.
It’s also the case that distributing sample content in digital form, including PDFs, is not new. For several years, both larger and smaller publishers have been testing the impact of free content on paid sales of both front-list and backlist content. Our 2009 report looked at tests done by Random House, as an example.
Finally, the success of one book does not “explode” the model. In fact, it could be the exception that proves the (old) rule. If we tested 1,000 books, and 999 were worse off and one was better off, viral marketing would be anathema. In that light, declaring Go the F*ck to Sleep an inflection point is premature.
If you consistently read our work and related posts on piracy, you already know my assessment: it’s okay to report what has lately been bandied about as “anecdata”, but it’s not smart to derive meaning from it.
This isn’t an argument that dismisses the possibility of a new digital marketing paradigm. In my gut, I think that the existing scale-hungry model is in serious disrepair. But I don’t have the data to prove it, and until I do I’m open to other interpretations.
Posted by Peter Turner
It seems—putting it simply—conclusions are best drawn on pools of data that are “meaningfully” large enough and aberrant data in either extreme needs to be discounted. Not a lot of this going on in publishing circles these days or by industry pundits.
Posted by Brian O'Leary
I don’t fault the article, which is pretty balanced, as much as the headline. Unfortunately, a lot of people won’t get past the headline or the first few paragraphs of the article.
When Attributor claimed that piracy was a “3 billion dollar problem”, it was tempting to dismiss the report as biased and inflammatory, but ... the real question (unanswered, at least as far as I can tell) is, “how do we know?”
The same concern exists here. Viral marketing, fueled by pirated content, may be a great option for some or even many books. We were trying to study that in 2008, but we failed to get enough participation to make the data sets meaningful.
I don’t dismiss the idea. In practice, claiming that this one example proves something guarantees that publishers won’t take the possibility seriously.