A waitress ...

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A waitress ...

A waitress spends three minutes making a £4 cup of coffeee, and you tip her

An author spends a year writing a book, and you complain that £2.99 is too high a price to pay

Hmmm

 

You've broken the golden rule of marketing here, Karl, which is that the customer is always king.

Like any other business, the book market is all about supply and demand (and the art of giving).

If I'm willing to pay £4 for a cup of coffee and the person making it does so with care and brings it to me with a smile, I'd gladly tip her. She didn't need to smile or make my coffee with love, and if she works for minimum wage, then the three minutes it took to carefully prepare my coffee tots up to about 32p in her pocket after tax. 

If an author has a book that I want to read, I'll gladly buy it; that's supply and demand. 

But if an author tries to sell me a book on the basis that he's spent a year writing it and feels an implausible resentment to a waitress doing her job, any interest in that author's book evaporates instantly. 

The really important thing in giving is to do so gladly, and not expect anything in return.

 

Haha Blighters, as usual, you make a very good point. I like to think of myself as a decent tipper, although I tend to stick to the expected in the country I’m in (10% in the UK, 15-18% in the USA, huge tip upon arrival on holiday followed by a decent tip when we leave) but, and this is a HUGE BUT, why on earth do we pay a percentage of the bill in a restaurant?

If I order steak at, say, £30 or hamburger at £5 does it involve any more work for the waitress to bring me the steak than the burger. Most restaurants are plate service nowadays. Very rarely do we eat out at semi-silver or silver service. So the more expensive items we order, the larger the tip. In the example above I’d pay £3 tip for the steak and 50p for the burger (in the UK), yet it takes the same amount of work from the waitress, although admittedly more from the chef.

Yet all of this is nonsense, of course, even though most of us tip this way, possibly out of laziness. To save us having to decide how much tip is ‘acceptable’ (to the waitress), we just opt for a percentage of the bill.

We probably give taxi drivers an extra quid, yet none of know why. Invariably they’re miserable and ask a certain amount of money for taking us from A to B. Why we decide to give them more money than they ask for is beyond me. But we do.

We don’t pay £30 - £60 to go to a football match and then leave a tip for the players on the way out of the gate.

None of which is my point, as I suspect you’re aware. My point is that authors, writers, musicians, painters, artists, chefs, pastry cooks, dancers etc. all deserve to be paid for their time and effort. Would the reader work for free? It’s unlikely, so why do a certain percentage of readers expect the writer to work for free?

Supply & demand? Maybe. There are lots of books out there. Probably about 1.5 million on ‘Zon alone. But there are lots of coffee shops also. Why don’t they offer free cups of coffee?          

 

If everybody offered free cups of coffee it creates an expectation that coffee is free- or thereabouts. An expectation has been created. In the same way cab drivers expect a tip and passengers pay it (apart from Uber). It's a virtuous circle or vicious circle if you are an artist. Writing is not regarded as work and millions of people write and blog for nothing and reinforce that assumpiton. Of course people will pay to go and see Arsenal, but they're not prepared to pay to watch the boy guild's team on a gravel park. If people weren't prepared to go and see Arsenal there would be no Arsenal. But if people are not prepared to pay writers there are still writers. It depends how you define writers and what you mean by writing.  

 

To be fair though, if a waitress spent a year making my coffee she wouldn't get any tip. 

 

what would alun do? Mr Oblong.

 

The concept of tipping hasn't reached Happy Island yet, neither has the concept of the £4 coffee. Mainlanders, what are they like, £4 for a coffee! 

 

 

 

 

I'm reading two books at the moment: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Jessie Burton's The Miniaturist. Total cost, £17.98. Both books are worth every penny; Jessie Burton's writing in particular is absolutely stunning. In any event, both books took far longer than twelve months to write. I would suggest two or three years at least has gone into them, or possibly more. And it shows in their quality. I'm happy to pay for them.

On the other hand, I read E O Higgins'  crowd-funded Conversations with Spirits a few days ago (well most of it) and found it hugely disappointing. For me the writing was clunky and over descriptive. Much of it could have been cut without affecting the plot at all. Basically, I don't believe it would have been published in its current form except by self-publishing or crowd-funding (Unbound). I'm afraid the vast majority of fiction in the self-publishing stable falls into the same category.

Perhaps my literary expectations are too high. Perhaps I'm a book snob. Either way, it makes no difference. Most people don't buy self-published fiction because either they don't trust it or, having 'Looked Inside' have found they don't like it.

For myself, I'm still struggling not to see fiction self-publishing as 'vanity' publishing without the cost. Crowd-funding too, in some cases, could be seen as vanity publishing but it's the writer's friends and family who have to stump up the readies to get it published.

As mentioned in a previous comment, the customer is always right. Four quid is expensive for a cup of coffee but it still represents good value. So in answer to your query I would say that if a writer wants his or her self published work to sell, they need to be writing what the consumer wants to read. That's the economics of it.

Scorpio, I've just launched a book on self-publishing. A number of authors have contributed 28% of the book because I wanted to represent the industry completely transparantly. Several issues are discussed including free giveaways, unscrupulous publishers, poor reviews, trolls etc. and interestingly whilst nobody likes trolls most self-published authors agree that the industry needs sorting out. There are people out there now who are just cashing in by publishing absolute crap, and that does nobody any good. I found one book that had 900 words in the first sentence!

However, I'd disagree that most self-published work is poor. Certainly a lot of it is, but there are some really great authors out there. You could say that certain writing on ABCtales is "clunky and over descriptive," and I'm sure it is, but not most of it.

I'm trying to read different genres, and a lot of times it's disappointing, but I've truly found some gems from Indie authors      

 

I started reading Wolf Hall. The opening where a father giving his son a right good kicking is vivid. As you'd expect of a Premier league writer that sells books in the hundreds of thousands with television spin offs it is a commercial and critcial success. But I got no further than the opening chapters. It bored me. I much prefered Mantel's articles about her writing life prior to finding fame and fortune in Saudia Arabia. Her 2005 novel Beyond Black, which I did read in entirety, was awful. Like you I didn't get beyond the opening of E O Higgin's novel. Crowdfunding, as I know to my cost is a terrible way, to fund books. Publishers know books that sell in tens of thousands are ones that feature well known faces. Wayne Rooney, author, or Wayne Rooney's wife is sure to be a commercial suceess as is the queen's corgis. Joe Lawrence has written a tremendous book, far better in my opinon that Wolf Hall. Everyone with literary pretension trots out  Fifty Shades of Grey, which I have not read, to show how shite self-publsihed authors are, but it is that rarity a cross-over from self to mainstream publishing generating enough interest to be taken up and produced as a film. Success breeds success and creates a virtuous circle in which popular books become even more lauded and part of the economics of book selling. Unbounds greatest success selling over 100 000 copies was Letters of Note. No one could have predicted this. It's not a book, but fragments of a book. Publishers don't know which way the book buying public will jump. They wait and see. Don't take chances. Amazon conquers all. The future is Amazon and self-publishing smashes all before it and brings down the cost of books to near zero. I wouldn't pay three or four quid for a coffee. Fuck that. Most folk wouldn't pay anything for a book. While I have a tendency to agree with you, cost is relative, as is quality.    

 

It's tricky. If the £2.99 price is for the ebook, which is effectively an email,  how much is the physical copy, ie the book? I can get Crime and Punishment on PDF for nothing and I don't have a Kindle. The market's tough for new writers but every man and his dog's got a tasty little novella out at the moment, all because of Amazon and the bloody  ebook. It's a separate market where everything is free if you have the time to trawl through the giveaway ebook guff on the daily specials.

 

The  "giveaway ebook guff" could, I fear, see the beginning of the end for the Indie self-publishing industry.

They hardly ever get read and if they do they attract poor reviews. The trad publishers could well be sitting on the sidelines waiting for the Indie industry to implode.

But everything we read on ABCtales is free.

I think this is a global problem. With Somalian cab drivers taking an airport run that goes £50 and doing it for £30 with the return for free. With bars in holiday resorts selling large beers for virtually nothing. The only person who wins is the punter.       

 

 

The  "giveaway ebook guff" could, I fear, see the beginning of the end for the Indie self-publishing industry.

They hardly ever get read and if they do they attract poor reviews. The trad publishers could well be sitting on the sidelines waiting for the Indie industry to implode.

But everything we read on ABCtales is free.

I think this is a global problem. With Somalian cab drivers taking an airport run that goes £50 and doing it for £30 with the return for free. With bars in holiday resorts selling large beers for virtually nothing. The only person who wins is the punter.