New Income Stream For Teachers

One reason I am so anti-"intellectual" "property" "rights" is it so constricts creativity and distribution.  As copyrights is dying out, artists are learning to market their work themselves.  The guitarist for Dire Straights has a tour coming up.  Now, of course you can buy tickets from his website, nothing new there.  But you can also pre-order a recording of the live concert from his website as well.  

Sadly his website seems not up to the task, as people are complaining an inability to make a purchase.  Sigh.  Yahoo offers bulletproof ecommerce solutions for $30 a month but people still spend megadollars reinventing the ecommerce site wheel.

Now, this marketing in some ways is nothing new, because the Grateful Dead used this method to promote their record sales, that is the bootleg tape.

My guess it is audio only since the media is a USB stick, but one in the shape of the fellows famous guitar.

So, if you are giving a live seminar somewhere, record it, and sell it on your website, or pre-sell it. Make it an event.

My Books Available On Amazon.Fr

Well, via Kindle...  so Amazon.com serves Kindle versions into France, Belgium, and Monaco, wherein people there can buy and download the books, but I am compensated via US$ remittances.  I priced Perish Your Publisher at the lowest possible ($2.99) and How Small Business Trades Worldwide at the regular $9.99, to see how they each do at those price points.

Working For Royalties

I just got a quote for printing my next book.  These will land at about $2.00, amazon sells for $16...  they take 55%, so $8.80 to them...  $7.20 gross to me, less $2.00 cost... is $5.20 gross profit.  Out of the $5.20 comes the expenses of running the business of selling the book. Self-employed,  it takes my time and creativity to sell the book.  It takes technology to do so, mine.  It takes travel and entertainment, etc.  Mine.  How much net profit is up to me. What the tax rate is, is up to the politicians.  Like Senator Reid said, taxes are voluntary.

People who rely on royalties may earn say 5%.  Say they get a check for $10,000 and the tax rate is 30%, so they net $7000.  

$10,000 is 5% of $200,000. So for an author to earn the $10,000 royalty, a publisher has to move 12,500 copies. For an author to earn the same $10,000 in the perish your publisher method, the author need only sell 1923 copies.

If I sold $200,000 worth of this book on Amazon.com, that would be 12,500 copies.  At $5.20 each gross, that would yield $65,000 for me.  I can spend that money on things I think need to be done.  Develop a business website in which you put the zip code of your best customers, and a program spits out other zip codes in USA with similar demographics, so you can keep finding where to prospect for your best customers.  I can develop white board technology for editing books that allows for 50 pages to be shown and edited at once.  I can spend a month in Hong Kong and London researching a book on free trade. All of this takes my time, creativity and the income from the sale of the books, but it is what I love to do.  It is all business related.  What is left over is taxed.

Now, a person earning royalties can also spend his $10,000 on whatever he wants as a business expense as well.  In both instances there is the subtle point that the money being spent is pretax.  (If you needed $65,000 to develop a new whiteboard, but if you had no business, and you were an employee, you would start with your own money, after tax dollars, so you'd have to earn say $100,000 at your job to net the $65,000 after taxes to finance your project.)

More: if I sold 12,500 in a year, I'd be buying at least at the 5000 copy level, so my landed drops to $1.00, and so my gross profit jumps from $5.20 to $6.20, from $65,000 to $77,500, that I must spend or have taxed, my choice.  Someone earning royalties still gets only $10,000.  (How do you think publishers afford those swank offices in New York?)

Why anyone would do all the work to create a book out and then leave all the profits to someone else, I do not know.  Authors mount lawsuits against Amazon.com and Google over copyright violations, when Amazon.com and Google.com can assist you in sextupling your income, or more, as a writer.  Authors desperately work to keep their incomes as low as possible, slavishly demanding that copyright laws be enforced.  Not only is there no basis for copyrights in theory or practice,  it is just plain nuts to write for royalties.

Konrath On Self Publishing

Thriller superstar Konrath has a very good summary of the traditional publishing model in which he works...  his article has almost 500 posts, a good summary of the attitude of writers.  Iconoclastic.

Kindle Gets Competition

Just in time for Christmas, Googlebooks opens up.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS reports

Google... opened its long-awaited electronic book store Monday, competing against Amazon.com Inc. and further accelerating the shift of book distribution from brick-and-mortar stores to the Web.

***Another theatre just shut down up the street from me.  This is not because fewer people are finding moving pictures entertaining, it is just more people are finding alternates to the mass viewing theatre.  There will always be theatres.  There will always be books.  The issue will be standards that meet customer expectations.***

Over the past decade, the number of independent stores operated by the ABA's membership has fallen from 3,000 to 1,700, the ABA said. McQuivey expects hundreds more to close during the next decade.

The upheaval will occur as sales of e-readers, tablets and electronic books steadily rise during the next five years.

...

Even larger book retailers are feeling the pressure to shake things up.

Activist investor William Ackman on Monday offered to finance a $963 million bid by Borders Group to buy rival Barnes & Noble Inc. Combined, the two retailers operate about 1,400 stores, many of which would presumably be closed if they were to combine forces.

Although most analysts doubted a deal would come together, the proposal underscores the challenges facing traditional book retailers as they look for ways to lower their costs.

...

Google's electronic book store, in the works for more than a year, draws upon a portion of the 15 million printed books that the Mountain View-based company has scanned into its computers since 2004.

About 4,000 publishers, including CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster Inc., Random House Inc. and Pearson PLC's Penguin Group, are also allowing Google to carry many of their recently released books in the new store.

Those publishing deals will ensure that most of the current best sellers are available in Google's store, said Amanda Edmonds, who oversaw the company's partnerships.

...

Google's e-books will work on the Nook, Sony Corp.'s Reader devices and practically every other e-reading device except the Kindle. Google achieves this with the help of Adobe Inc.'s copy-protection system for e-books.

...

Google plans to offer sharp discounts on many of its e-books but it will still pay publishers 52 percent of the list price for sales made on its site, unless another arrangement has been negotiated with an outside agency.

The formula means that even if Google elects to sell a book with a $10 list price for $6, the publisher would still get $5.20.

The revenue-sharing formula changes slightly when the electronic sales occur through one of the independent book merchants or other partners Google hopes to recruit. Google didn't disclose the precise split of these arrangements.

***All of this is inevitable, and will lead to the best all-round deal for all concerned.  The best part of this is with digitl books, there is a no return policy.***

"In the long run, I don't think Google has a strong appetite to make it easier for book sellers to stay alive," McQuivey said.

———

***Right, it is the booksellers job to keep themselves viable, by serving customers.***

Book Burning Logic

Apparently a black Ops soldier veteran of Afghanistan has written a tell all that the Pentagon did not care for.  So the Pentagon bought up almost all 10,000 copies of the first run from St. Martin's Press, and demanded, and got censorship, and subsequent runs.  Foolish really, since "almost all" is not all, and no doubt soon enough wikileaks will have it out.

The whole thing is silly anyway, since whatever he said the enemy already knows, since what he did he did to the enemy.  If I toilet paper your house, and then demand it be kept secret from you that your house was toilet-papered, it seems rather pointless.  You know. So it is not much of a secret.

Such secrets are kept to make sure USA citizens, generally a fair lot, do not find out what our military is up to.

PErish You Publisher would not only assure the truth got out, it would mean royalties of $100,000 for the 10,000 copies, instead of the $12,500 or so the author most likely would earn.