>The economics of subscription suggest a shift in incentives away from the years-long creation of 300+ page tomes, and toward serialization or shorter forms.
This has already happened. For smarter writers, Amazon's distribution model killed the Big Novel model and pushed them to a cheap installment-of-the-month model.
Dickens used to publish like this (not through Amazon, obviously) so it's not necessarily a bad model.
But writers are notoriously bad at business, which is why mainstream publishing contracts have gotten away with being so larcenous and exploitative for so long, and why it's been so hard to make a living out of fiction unless you top the best-seller lists.
Amazon changed that. A lot of authors were finding they could support themselves from self-published fiction, full-time - which was never possible with trad-pub contracts, because they give mid-list and lower writers a tiny advance, insultingly small royalties, and take up to two years to get a book into the stores after the writing is done.
Those self-pub writers are going to be looking at this nervously to see how it changes the economics again.
Not that they should be surprised. A lot of people predicted this.
Absolutely. Although I'm maybe more optimistic on this point:
"Those self-pub writers are going to be looking at this nervously to see how it changes the economics again."
I dunno. For the time being, many of them will need to think carefully about how this shift changes things. But they're the ones who stand the benefit the most here. Self-pubbers who have been playing a volume and catalog game -- as the more successful ones have for years now -- are going to understand how to play this new game. Traditional authors, who've never been much for business or self-promotion as a group, are going to freak out. People with large catalogs are going to win. People with one or two Big Novels are going to lose (unless those Big Novels happen to be bestsellers already). People who can produce reams and reams of new material every year, nurturing mailing lists and activating fan bases, are going to keep doing that, and it will keep serving them well.
This has already happened. For smarter writers, Amazon's distribution model killed the Big Novel model and pushed them to a cheap installment-of-the-month model.
Dickens used to publish like this (not through Amazon, obviously) so it's not necessarily a bad model.
But writers are notoriously bad at business, which is why mainstream publishing contracts have gotten away with being so larcenous and exploitative for so long, and why it's been so hard to make a living out of fiction unless you top the best-seller lists.
Amazon changed that. A lot of authors were finding they could support themselves from self-published fiction, full-time - which was never possible with trad-pub contracts, because they give mid-list and lower writers a tiny advance, insultingly small royalties, and take up to two years to get a book into the stores after the writing is done.
Those self-pub writers are going to be looking at this nervously to see how it changes the economics again.
Not that they should be surprised. A lot of people predicted this.