Now, you’ve talked briefly—I mean, jeez, you’ve got so much in that conversation that I’d like to jump off from…
Sorry, I’m very verbose, so feel free to cut in any time.
…involved in thing that you did, I mean…I was thinking earlier in your comments about how those who came to start reading science fiction and fantasy in the, you know, 80s, largely—in the post-Lin Carter boom of fantasy and science fiction that came out in the late 70s, early 80s…
Mmhmm.
…being primarily people who read novels rather than short stories—and the first thing that hit my mind is that, you know, kind of one of the seminal works of science fiction, right—Asimov’s Foundation —
Yep.
There’s a whole generation of people older than I am, and older than you are, who read that as short stories as they came out…
Yep. Yep, and I read it as a novel first; I’d never known it in short story form.
Right, and I’m in the same boat, and those even seem, you know, like short novels to me.
Yep.
You know, those are the kind of books you read in an afternoon, where a Tad Williams novel is something that might take, you know, a weekend of, you know, devoted reading…
Yup.
…ah, to get through the Bible-thin pages, and the massive length of the novel has become the norm—or an Ian Banks science fiction novel…
Yup.
…which, you know, if you bought in hardback, you could probably, you know, put a hole in the floor when you set it down…
[laughs] Yeah.
…it’s so weighty. But, I wanted to, since you talked a little bit about internet distribution, and, you know, the kind of expectation of ‘free’, but also the interactivity on something that maybe, you’re not using it as a means to actually distribute, but maybe to work and foment the product. You worked on your more recent Warbreaker novel through a kind of, we’ll say, sausage-making process that, if people followed it on the internet, they could see the development of the novel before it was published.
Yes.
Could you about that a little bit?
Sure.
And kind of the impetus behind that and, you know, how you feel about the result of that process.
The impetus behind it was really watching how the internet worked with viral marketing and with really the self-made artists—the webcomic community, I pay a lot of attention to, because of how I think it’s fascinating the way that this entire community of artists is building up and bypassing all middlemen, and just becoming…you know, I have several friends who are full-time cartoonists who can make their entire living posting webcomics through ad-supported and reader-supported—you know, either buying collections or donations and things like this—I thought that’s fascinating. I don’t think that it will work, as I said, with long-form or even short-form fiction because of the difference between the mediums, but I like looking at webcomics as a model just to see what’s going on there. There’s a science fiction author, Cory Doctorow, who’s a very interesting author and has a lot of very fascinating things to say, a lot of them very, uh…very… aggressive , and certainly conversation-inspiring—how about that?—and one of the things he started doing, very high-profilely—he’s one of the bloggers of Boing-Boing, so he’s very high profile on the internet—is that he started posting the full text of his books online as he released them with his publisher. So, Cory Doctorow is releasing his books for free, and he has a famous quote, at least among writers, which says that, “As a new author, my biggest hindrance—the biggest thing I need to overcome—is obscurity.”
And, so that’s why he releases his books for free. He figures, get them out there, get as many people reading them as possible…and then that will make a name for him, and this sort of thing. Well, that scares a lot of the old guard. Giving it away for free is very frightening to them, and for legitimate reasons, but there was a whole blow-up in the Science Fiction Writers of America on this same topic, about a year or so ago—what you give away for free, and what you don’t—and I said that Cory was right in a lot of the things that he was saying, particularly about obscurity. There are so many new authors out there. Who are you going to try, and how are you going to know if they’re worth plopping this money down? It’s the same sort of problem I have with albums. I don’t want to try a new artist, because if I plop $10 down and then hate every track on the album…what’s…what have I just, you know, done? I feel like I’ve wasted the money; I feel annoyed. So, I either wait till I get recommendations—and even then, a lot of times I’ll buy an album, and then be like, “Man, I wish I’d gotten something else.”—or I’ll try the really popular songs, which may not be the songs on the album I like, which just puts you in all sorts of problems where, how do you know if you’re going to like this artist or not?
Authors are the same way. You pick up a fantasy novel—a big, thick 600-page fantasy novel—you look at it, and you say, “You know, how am I gonna know if this guy’s any good?” Am I gonna spend 30 bucks on a hardcover, or even, you know, 8 or 9 bucks on a paperback, you get home, and then you start reading this and you discover that this is just the wrong artist for me? So, I felt that the thing to do was to release a book for free. Being, just, I dunno…[cut] part of it was wanted to do the [?], try something I hadn’t seen before, which was to write the book, and post the drafts online as I wrote them, chapter by chapter, perhaps hopefully to get a little publicity, where people would say, “Hey, he’s letting us see the process!” Partially to, you know, to give something to my fans that they couldn’t get from other books, which is being able to see the process firsthand, help out new writers, whatever…whatever it could do, I felt very good about the opportunity there, and posting chapters as I wrote them, always with the understanding that this would be the next book I published; I mean Tor had already said that they were going to publish it. It wasn’t an experiment in that I wanted to see how it would turn out—I was pretty confident in the story, with the outline I had—but I wanted to experiment in showing readers drafts, letting them give me advice, essentially workshopping it with my readers as I wrote it, and see how that affected the process, and affected the story.
And so that’s what I did, and actually I started posting drafts in 2006; it didn’t come out until 2009, so it was a three-year process during which I finished the first draft after about a year of posting chapters, and then I did a revision, and then another revision, and they got to see these revisions, and I would post um…you can still find them on my website—brandonsanderson.com—you can still find all of these drafts, and comparisons between them using Microsoft Word’s ‘compare document’ function, and some of these things, and…I think it was a very interesting process. Did it boost my sales? I don’t know. Did it hurt my sales? I don’t know. It was what it was, and it was a fun experiment; it’s something I might do again in the future. Probably if I write a sequel to Warbreaker , I would approach it the same way. It’s not something I plan to do with all of my books, partially because not all of my books do I want the rough drafts to be seen. Warbreaker , I was very…I had…I was very confident in the story I was telling, and sometimes, parts of the story you’re very confident in, and parts of the story you know you’re going to have to work out in drafts, and that’s just how it is, and in other cases, it’s better to build suspense for what’s happening, and…so, there’s just lots of different reasons to do things, but Warbreaker , being a standalone novel that I had a very solid outline for was something that I wanted to try this with, and once the Wheel of Time deal happened, which was just an enormous change in direction for my career, I was very glad I had a free novel on the internet, because then, people who had only heard of me because, “Who’s this Brandon Sanderson guy? I’ve never heard of him before,” could come to my website, download a free book, read something that I’d written, and say, “Okay,” then at least they know who I am. They at least have an experience—and hopefully they enjoy the book, and it will put to ease some of their worries, even though Warbreaker isn’t in the same style that I’m writing the Wheel of Time book in, it at least hopefully can show that I can construct a story and have compelling characters and have some interesting dialogue and these sorts of things that will maybe, hopefully, relax some of the Wheel of Time fans who are worried about the future of their favorite series. [chuckle in background]
Right, and it’s good that you’re working with Tor in a lot of this, because of course Tor is one of the publishers that’s kind of renown for attempting to—I mean I don’t know, I don’t get to look at the numbers either, so I don’t know what their success is—but really attempting to get readers to purchase their books, and to read their books, and then purchase follow-up books by, you know, almost using a ‘first one is free’ philosophy on the internet.
Yeah, Tor is very good at that. In fact the whole science fiction and fantasy market has been very good—as opposed to the music industry—in using the internet and viral sorts of things to their advantage rather than alienating their audience, which I appreciate very much.
Yeah, I mean, obviously the music industry has a disadvantage that the publishing industry in books doesn’t suffer from, and that’s the brevity of the item.
Yep, yep. Very easy to download a song, and…yeah.
And they have some additional obstacles, but it’s, you know, one of the things that they’ve done extraordinarily poorly is handle any kind of PR, or any kind of the public debate as far as, you know, defending themselves I think against—you know, legitimately it’s theft, taking music for free—but, you know, attacking twelve-year-olds…
Right. Or grandmothers, or things like that. Yeah, just a [?] way to approach it. You know, they’re just a very different sort of situation. With audio, number one, downloading a song and listening to it, you get the very same experience listening to it that you would if you’d bought it, whereas downloading a book, it’s not the same experience; reading it electronically for most of us is not the same experience as holding the book. And beyond that, publishing in today’s market is actually kind of a niche thing; it’s a niche market. Not entirely of course, but science fiction and fantasy, we are…we have…despite the explosion of science fiction and fantasy into the mainstream, I still think we are a small but significant player in publishing, if that makes sense. We have a small fanbase that is very loyal that buys lots of books, is generally how we approach it, and because of that loyal fanbase, that’s really how science fiction and fantasy exists as a genre, because of people who are willing to buy the books when they can go to the library and get them for free, people who want to have the books themselves, to collect them, to share them, to loan them out. That’s how this industry survives, hands down. And so, I mean…that’s…Tor gets by. The reason Tor can exist as a publisher is because it produces nice, hardcover epic fantasy and science fiction books that readers want to own and have hardcover copies up to display on the shelves, with nice maps, with nice cover illustrations, which, you know, covers on science fiction and fantasy books have come a long way since the 60s and 70s. Just go back and look at some of these…and part of that is because the artists of course have gotten better—there’s more money in it—but there’s also this idea that we need to create a product that is just beautiful for your shelf, because that’s how we exist as an industry. Romance novels don’t exist on the same…in the same way; they exist in lots of volume of cheap copies being sold, and romance authors do very well with paperbacks—and some science fiction and fantasy authors do too, just different styles—but with epic fantasy, we really depend on those very nice, good-looking hardcovers, and so, we….giving away the book for free actually makes a lot of sense for us, because…the idea…we’re selling for the people who want to have copies anyway, who could’ve gotten it for free from their friends, or by going to the library and getting it, or now downloading it, I mean…we have a very literate community; they know where to find the book for free online if they want to get them illegally, and we don’t really go and target those websites and take them down, because you know what….it’s not…the people who are buying our books are not the people who are…how should I say? If they’re gonna get them for free, it doesn’t discourage them from buying the book, generally. In fact they’re more likely, I think, to buy the book if they read it for free first, and then like it, we’re the types of people…I mean, we’re the types of people who have 5,000 books in their basements, who if they love a book, go buy it in hardcover, and if they just merely like a book, we go buy it in paperback, and loan it around to all our friends still.
And so, that’s who we’re selling to, and that’s who I think we’ll continue to sell to. I don’t think the book industry is threatened by the internet in the same way that the movie and music industry is, for various reasons, but I also don’t think that we can…a lot of people say, ‘get rid of the middle man’. I talked about the webcomic industry, and how they’re able to just produce it all themselves. It doesn’t work with novels. What I think readers don’t realize is that most of the cost in a novel is not the printing. Most of what you’re paying for when you’re buying a book is the illustrator, is the copy-editor and the editor, and the layout and design team and all of this, which you really can’t get rid of. Bypassing the middleman means you’d get a book that’s unedited, and if you’ve read a book that’s unedited, you’ll realize why we have editors and typesetters and all of these people, and so, you know, the Kindle Revolution, if it ever happens—the ebook revolution or this sort of thing—will actually, I think, be a benefit to us, but I think people are going to be surprised that the prices don’t come down as drastically as they would’ve thought, because of that, you know, $25 hardcover, you know, $5 of that is printing and shipping, but most of that is overhead for the publisher.
Yeah, Lord knows I read the unedited version of Stranger in a Strange Land , and I said, “Oh god, give me the edited version again.”
[laughs] Yeah.
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