The wilderness is the term for the years (or decades) that a founder / entrepreneur / artist / technology must spend being ignored and unfunded before the breakthrough of overnight success occurs.
Sometimes Ben Brooks is so money it’s not even funny.
From his “If I Were CEO” post re: RIM.
It’s painful, expensive, time-consuming, stressful and ultimately pointless to work overtime to preserve your dying business model.
The majority of my sales come from Amazon and my ability to use the tools they provide. So far I’ve played my cards right. I write fun books with good covers and sell them cheap, I have a lot of virtual shelf space, and readers like my writing.
via JA Konrath’s The Value of Publicity.
If there is anyone providing more hands-on insight into how book purchase decisions are made, I’ve yet to find them.
His understanding of how the Amazon game is played is also likely second to none.
If you are in any way associated with the eBook segment, you’ll be well served in paying attention to Konrath’s insights.
Amazon, in other words, appears to be boldly breaching its contracts with these publishers. This is an exercise of brute economic power.
Quote courtesy of the Authors Guild.
I’m not sure what they (or anyone else) would expect from Amazon. Of course they are going to use brute force to shape their most important markets … just as every other company on the planet is trying to do.
Limited Access v. Added Value, A Pay Wall Debate
Limiting access to content hasn’t been the right answer for anything on the web, and it isn’t suddenly going to become the right answer for news on the web, either.
Rather than trying to limit content, publishers need to experiment with the ways they engage their readers.
No one can begrudge a publisher for needing to realize additional revenue from their news content. In most instances, the news isn’t researched or written for free. However, everyone should “begrudge” the publishers for continually going back to a dry well - “off the shelf pay walls”.
Two simple “pay to play” ideas that need to receive significantly more exploration are:
- Limited ad content - remove a significant number of the ads from the content and allow the premium customer to select which advertisers they wish to receive ads from.
- Ad free content - remove all ads from the content and offer the reader the right to pay for this privilege.
With everyone from the WSJ, NYT and Washington Post to the MN StarTribune working at finding ways to cut their content off from readers with pay walls, it would be nice to see some organizations step up and offer value in exchange for an increased cost.
The speed of experimentation and testing around “pay to play” news needs to accelerate, rapidly. If it doesn’t, we are all going to be watching truly great resources vanish.
