Cory Doctorow Speaks Sense at Melb Writers' Fest

In a session called "Free and Easy" Cory Doctorow did his best to share his knowledge and insights to a motivated and interested audience through the obstacles of Charles Firth's ignorance and bull-headedness. There was also an annoying woman MC who added no value to the proceedings (sorry whoever you are, but you should have just given the man the stage and stayed out of the way) particularly given that the topic was about copyright, reproduction and making a living in the digital age.

I'll own up right away - I haven't read anything about him or by him. I didn't know he had his own wiki page (which he does) I just knew that I'd shelved his books a *lot* at kino and here he would be talking about making a living but giving away copies of his books for free on-line. It's true - they're available under the creative commons right there at the bottom of his wiki entry.
The Melb WritFest (MWF now, ok) have this weird thing going where they charge you to go to nearly any session!? What the!? When you've flown 2000kloms to get to it, and then had a closer look at the fine print, this feels like a rude shock. I know $20 isn't much in the context of the flight and travel costs and everything, but it seemed weird on principle. Having said that, if I could have paid more to just get an hour of download & QA from Cory (sans the interruptions) it would have re-wired my brain.

Enough gum flapping.
(there's a lot of paraphrasing here - my notes are shot, don't blame him for any crappy expression.)

He opened with a short take on the information economy - what is it really - in little ways it's people finding a plumber on google, or using a satnav to find the airport, or Facebook to choose a restaurant. These are the meaningful, personal ways that the information economy has started to become a reality. Reality is always messier than the theory expects it will be. Bits of stuff have value and cost cash but bytes of stuff flow around protection. Pirated movies anybody? The economy for a while (about 70 years) has been predicated on controlling the copies and being able to sell them, and as we all know, this system is flailing about right now. Cory drew an interesting line to the resurgence of the vaudeville model - where the "charismatic" performer takes the stage and access to the event is controlled and a dollar is charged at the door. Those same people who about 70 years ago got told to stop touring and produce records - which would do all the touring for them. (I hope he got a decent cut of the $20 I paid to see him then!).

Creative types still need to put bread in the toaster and kibble in the bowl - so what is there to sustain them if all the copies are free?
How does the rent get paid?!

Well, for Cory Doctorow, the rent gets paid for by (leaving other speculations aside) people buying copies of his books. People buying copies of the same books that are available for free on the web. Free books with no encryption, no time-outs, no dodgy sample chapter set up. Whole texts. Buying, with actual cash.

Here's how this works in his own words:
"Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book--those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They're gained sales." (Read the whole article).

Anyone who's worked in sales or a bookstore or ever just been honest about their own buying habits is going to get that line of reasoning right away. Charles Firth didn't. (That's the last time I'll mention him. No need for my pain to be your pain).

But we're in SF world. A *special* world.
Cory again (from the same Forbes article)
"How did I talk Tor Books into letting me do this? It's not as if Tor is a spunky dotcom upstart. They're the largest science fiction publisher in the world, and they're a division of the German publishing giant Holtzbrinck. They're not patchouli-scented info-hippies who believe that information wants to be free. Rather, they’re canny assessors of the world of science fiction, perhaps the most social of all literary genres. Science fiction is driven by organized fandom, volunteers who put on hundreds of literary conventions in every corner of the globe, every weekend of the year. These intrepid promoters treat books as markers of identity and as cultural artifacts of great import."

Yeah! But what about books that aren't SF? What do you with your future-dude glasses see for the daggy, non SF writers and this on-line world. I love SF, but my attempts to write it have always been lame. I can write other stuff though - how can I pay the rent? Google ads? Is that my best option?

The long tail takes a long time - I'd like to earn some money in my lifetime. Sure, the value (be that entertainment, education, whatever) of the work is the longer-term purpose, but the day to day of spending my hours toiling in a job for someone else is the issue.
I think that was going to be his next point though ... that the long tail does take a long time (the great enemy is obscurity) and that free distribution escalates finding your audience. It also begins to create a market for you the writer. Yeah you. What is writing after all but one of the ways that you put your thoughts into an order and have them tussle each other? You'll have to deal with the idea that your writing might lead you to blogging, or talking or teaching or being interviewed by Forbes Magazine.

The session kinda deteriorated towards the end, but apart from the content that I have tried to capture pretty faithfully above, the best thing I got out of this was inspiration. I sat afterwards and watched probably 20 people line up and buy one (or more) of his books and get them signed. Ka-Ching! But we all know how lush it is to hold a book, and feel the grain of the paper, and when you've stood in the line and had it signed - well - it's special. Even for the person who eventually buys it on Ebay.
We buy the books we love - that's the new model. I expect the luxe-model Hardcover to emerge soon and be a hit - but only for titles that have proved themselves in the tail. Remember how gob-smacked we were when DaVinci Code came out - after 4 years in the large format illustrated hardcover - and had another spike?! Well that's a taste of things to come.

Books that earn their chops will find a place on the shelf rather than the harddrive.

It was inspiring because he was totally credible. This wasn't some suit-monkey sprouting shit from an online MBA. Authentic reporting from the frontline. I'm grateful to him for kicking me over into thinking about my own life and my own creativity within the context of post-scarcity economics.

In short then, a really great session. Plus, I was so wired from it that I got talking to someone else from the session (Melbourne is so friendly, in Sydney she would have called security) and learnt a whole lot more again. Hopefully as I return into this mundane orbit, loads of it will stay with me and the dream will keep breathing.