The best advice I ever got on writing was from an acting
teacher my freshman year. I asked her
about playwriting. "I don't know
anything about writing," she said, "but I know that a Broadway play
costs $50." (Okay, I just dated
myself). "You have to write a story
worth $50 to the average working person."
That always struck me as an excellent test of quality. Can I tell a story that is worth the
audience's cold hard cash? That's a
standard that is visceral. It's
real. It cuts through all of the
literary, English major crap and gets right down to nitty-gritty. The most important critical question I have for any
reader is, "did you get your money's worth?"That question has become top of the list in this digital day and age. What is a story worth? Is it $2.99? $9.99? $13.99? Will amateur authors flood the market with such low-priced material that professionals can no longer make a living? Is it better to sell ten books at $2.99 or three at $9.99? If you do sell a lot of books at a low-price, should you then raise the price?
And there is the question of the value of a publisher's
stamp. When Harper Collins publishes a
book, they are saying, "Out of the thousands of books we've screened, this
one is worth your time and money."
What is that recommendation worth?
As publishers put out more books on the e-market, do they de-value the
worth of their stamp?
In talking about traditional verses e-publishing, the
questions of value centered around hard costs like paper, printing, art,
etc. Now, of course, we're learning that
e-packaging – metadata, formatting, meeting platform requirements – come at a
cost. But the real question is harder to
answer. What is the story itself
worth? Storytellers are unique to our
species. We are not human without them,
but how much are we willing to pay them?
I don't have the answers.
Do you?
R.S. Mellette is an experienced screenwriter, actor, director, and novelist. You can find him at the Dances With Films festival blog, and on Twitter, or read him in the Spring Fevers and The Fall: Tales of the Apocalypse anthologies.
3 comments:
Nope. But you're asking good questions.
I don't think anyone can answer these questions. Like with agents and publishers, it's ALL selective... One can't generalize these questions because tastes are different.
One person might pay ten bucks for something, but another would never spend more that three. It's all in the public eye. An author just has to hit the right note.
A good question indeed, and one I don't have the answer to, either. I think you're earlier question, "As publishers put out more books on the e-market, do they de-value the worth of their stamp?" I think the answer is going to be no. They're still putting their stamp on it and packaging it in a way that should make it clear to the reader that this is Harper Collins, or Random-Penguin, etc. It may not be the first thing people notice (until I started seriously writing, I barely gave a glance to the publisher), but I think they'll notice, especially if e-tailers get creative ways to keep their brands up in everyone's faces on the virtual shelves.
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