On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 11:28:39PM -0600, Gametech <voltronalpha at hotmail.com> wrote: > I think there is a very good reason for book releases (from the buisness > standpoint) that are scheduled apart from each other. First you have the > book only available in Hardback (it costs more to the buyer, considerably > more) some people no matter what are unwilling to buy their novels in that > price range and rather purchase paperbacks. Others *like us* will buy in the > moment it comes out in whatever version is available, it's the same reason > you can't find most books in paperback when the book is new, they know they > can make more money so... they DO! Granted this is all guess work becuase I > have no involvment in the publishing industry. I'd really have to like an > author to buy a book in Hardcover otherwise I could always wait (Ha Wait!? > yeah right) Think of it this way you'll get to read LoCB a year or more > ahead of the people whom won't pay the Hardcover price. But for people who know they will buy the whole bloody thing, it makes little sense to make them wait when the books are already available. This is marketing, pure and simple -- they want to release "1 book a year" in this series, to spread out the "newness" factor, to attract fans in the year between books, to allow for suspense... all of that. To be honest, I've seriously considered setting up a kind of "subscription writing" system. IOW, a website where aspiring writers can post their works and interested readers can search for new stuff they like. If someone's good enough to want to go commercial, they can charge a fee for reading their works. I see a couple different possible arrangements, with works published on a chapter-by-chapter basis -- the return of the serial novel, perhaps. 1) Buy a physical book: see amazon. ;) 2) Buy an author subscription: anything they write for the term of the subscription, in perpetuity. (Some sort of minimum output would be required of the author...) 3) Buy a whole book: an entire book, in perpetuity. 4) Buy a genre/publisher/etc subscription: reduced-cost access to large categories of work. 5) Buy a book + etext: buy a book in etext format, get a physical copy when it's published (would require partnership with dead-tree publishers). Authors would ideally publish by chapter and allow some of the works to be read free as teasers. This addresses a lot of problems with the modern publishing industry, but in particular: the death of the midlist, the economics of publishing marginal writers, the time-to-market for fans, the "middleman factor", the difficulty of not actually knowing who is buying what and why. Baen's webscriptions setup is reasonable, but they are still a dead-tree publishing company, and I suspect they are missing a lot of tricks. So, I know all of you reading this are regular readers and at least somewhat tech-savvy. I am too, or I wouldn't be here. How many of you would be interested in something like this -- assuming, of course, that there were authors you wanted to read using it? -- Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org) Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/index.jsp