quote:I've released every one of my novels under Creative Commons licenses that encourage fans to share them freely and widely — even, in some cases, to remix them and to make new editions of them for use in the developing world. My first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, is in its sixth printing from Tor, and has been downloaded more than 650,000 times from my website, and an untold number of times from others' websites.
I've discovered what many authors have also discovered: releasing electronic texts of books drives sales of the print editions. An SF writer's biggest problem is obscurity, not piracy. Of all the people who chose not to spend their discretionary time and cash on our works today, the great bulk of them did so because they didn't know they existed, not because someone handed them a free e-book version.
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Its true, its tough to find a new author. You can't exactly read every back cover of a book in a store to find something.
Posts: 3134 | Registered: Mar 2005
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Scifi books also share a problem with fantasy, in that the cover design often has nothing to do with the story in the book. Just look at the covers to the Ender series. And, sad to say, we still do occasionally judge books by their cover. If I look in the scifi section, I just see cover after cover of aliens and spaceships with no inkling about what the books are about. This is a good idea.
Posts: 3852 | Registered: Feb 2002
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quote:science fiction is the only literature people care enough about to steal on the Internet
I think he's overstating his case about science fiction. Part of the reason that science fiction and fantasy are so much more widely available online is that that people who scan, share, and download books are much more likely to be geeks who enjoy science fiction and fantasy than the general population.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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quote:Scifi books also share a problem with fantasy, in that the cover design often has nothing to do with the story in the book.
Do you mean to imply that other genres do not suffer from this problem? Many mainstream fiction books have what seem to be random pictures on the front. When I judge a book by its cover, as I often do, the judgement doesn't usually involve what the topic of the book is by the cover. Instead, I seem to consider a) the quality of the cover work, and b) what audience I percieve the cover work appealing to. Maybe this is a topic for another thread.
Posts: 872 | Registered: Mar 2002
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I have a good friend who has reccomended Cory Doctorow to me for some time. I might just take his word for it and read Doctorow's online editions of his writings.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Scifi books also share a problem with fantasy, in that the cover design often has nothing to do with the story in the book.
Do you mean to imply that other genres do not suffer from this problem? Many mainstream fiction books have what seem to be random pictures on the front. When I judge a book by its cover, as I often do, the judgement doesn't usually involve what the topic of the book is by the cover. Instead, I seem to consider a) the quality of the cover work, and b) what audience I percieve the cover work appealing to. Maybe this is a topic for another thread.
I think the observation is that sci-fi and fantasy book covers all look THE SAME. Pile onto that the likelihood that the cover bears NO relation whatsoever to the book, and that gets pretty difficult when you're looking at them in a store. Other book covers may be a bit random, but the covers are not so alike as they are when you get into the fantasy or sci-fi section of a bookstore. Plus, most sci-fi book covers look cheep and cheesy, so it doesn't feel like a respectable place to be in the bookstore, like being in the comic book section.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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