IP, intermediaries, and making it work as an indie // Doctorow's "Information Doesn't Want to Be Free"
I’ve very much enjoyed reading Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free📕 (2014).
The book is part grim assessment of the IP/copyright landscape, part call-to-activism, and part pragmatic advice for creatives who must navigate (and earn a living in) today’s world, with all its quirks and quarrels, instead of waiting for tomorrow’s.
I want to highlight three of the book’s big throughlines.
1 // The first is that tight control over IP is not possible, in any practical sense, and that any attempt to force the issue will invariably require violating human rights. The big media companies (and many governments) are working in favor of this future, whereas indie creators are doing the opposite, finding a way to adapt to this new copy-crazed reality without criminalizing everyday behavior.
Complaining about the universe’s unfairness is never part of a successful strategy. Here are some other things that don’t make money:
* Complaining about piracy. * Calling your customers thieves. * Treating your customers like thieves.
And from Amanda Palmer, in her foreword to the book:
This is the lesson I learned, as a rock star and as a street performer:
* Keep the content authentic, * keep the exchange honest, * keep the message spreading by any means necessary, and people will come. * Once they come, if you make it easy for them, many will pay.
I knew many wouldn’t [choose to pay me]. But I needed only about 3 percent of the passersby to take part in my magic little performance to pay my rent and feed myself. And they always did.
2 // The second big topic, which I’m still noodling over, is about the impact of powerful intermediaries (like retailers) on both creators and investors, and the way that copy-control ends up serving the intermediaries above all.
The progression, as Doctorow describes it, goes like this:
- A digital retailer (like iTunes or Kindle or whoever) offers to “protect” publisher profits via DRM and copy prevention
- Publishers love that idea and enthusiastically agree, forcing artists and creators to tag along
- Before long, end consumers are largely locked in to a single retailer’s platform and formats
- The publisher then realizes that they are *also* locked in, just as much as the end consumer
- The retailer then returns to the publisher to begin a small “renegotiation,” where they end up with (approximately) everything, the creators get (approximately) nothing, and the publishers get the change
I rely heavily on Amazon for my livelihood, so I do wonder at what stage the kindle ecosystem is up to, what comes next, and how I ought to prepare.
Cory says:
If you’re a creator, your ability to earn a living is directly tied to two things:
**1. Your negotiating leverage with the companies and people who control the channels between you and your audience.
- The ease with which your work can be discovered by potential customers.**
Having leverage and finding an audience isn’t a guarantee that you’ll earn anything, of course. But you can’t earn a single penny until you have those two things.
3 // Related to the above, the third throughline is a set of guiding principles on how to make it as an indie:
Fame won’t make you rich, but you can’t get paid without it. […]
Of course, it bears repeating that reaching an audience isn’t the same as convincing them that you have anything they want to see. And if they do want to see (or hear, or read, or play) what you’ve got, they may not be willing to part with their money to do that. **But:
- No one can decide whether your stuff is worth money until they see it; and
- they can’t see it until they know it exists.**
“Fame” is a trigger-y word, but it needn’t refer only to the direst depths of reality tv and social media. A scientist whose research is widely cited within their field will be “famous,” at least in the sense of being known and respected among their relevant peers and gatekeepers.
Call it “reputation,” if you prefer.
It represents the idea that at least to some group of people, somewhere, you aren’t a stranger. That someone out there knows you do good work and values what you make. So how do we get there?
Good at spreading copies, good at spreading fame.
I’m convinced. So I’m gonna start giving away my books for free, at least on the web versions. If you haven’t read it yet, here’s Write Useful Books📔, in its entirety, as a free web version: https://helpthisbook.com/robfitz/useful
(That linked version is missing a few minor corrections of typos and whatnot, and I’m in the process of doing a larger 1.10 update to the whole book that will be out soon. I’ll get a “canonical” web version up once that’s ready, with all the bells and whistles. But I wanted to share what I had in the meantime. )
Comments (7)
, insightful post, thanks for sharing.
This feels a bit like an “if you build it, they will come” approach to value capture.
Both value creation and value capture are important (as per Peter Thiel), and we need to be intentional about managing both.
As with any freemium product, deciding what goes into the free version is hard, and we need to be intentional about it.
Starting with the whole book may not even be the best option for the reader. Maybe they want a summary, a blog post, or even a video.
What do you think?
The metaphor that Doctorow uses is about shifting the way you think about your work away from "mammal" (where every piece of work is like a baby that must be carefully protected and kept safe), and toward "dandelion" (where you put as much as you can out onto the winds, on the basis that some will take root).
He does still acknowledge that gaining anyone's attention is a herculean task, and that even after you've gotten it, you still may not get paid.
So his point isn't that giving it away (or building it in the first place) is a guarantee that you'll succeed, but only that over-protecting it (to the point where it's difficult for even legitimate customers to find/buy/use, as with much DRM and copy protection) guarantees you'll fail.
In terms of the right or optimal thing to give away, I agree that I need to explore it. But my gut instinct is something along the lines of, "As much as possible, in as many formats as possible, without undermining people's ability to pay me if they want to."
So a web version is definitely a yes, whereas a PDF is more of an open question (since lots of universities buy PDF licenses). The audiobook will stay paid, but while recording it, I'll probably turn on a webcam, and then release the complete footage for free as a youtube series. And the community will be paid, but I'll probably take the book's full content, plus some commentary, and put it out there as a free email drip series (e.g., a 20 day drip with a chapter every other day, and commentary/examples/tasks on the alternating days).
So while I'm still very unclear on the specifics, I feel relatively high-confidence about the overall direction.
I find the value attributed to different formats fascinating. The same content can be on YouTube for free and as a $30 book and a $3,000 course. I’ve got hundreds of Kindle books so, when I downloaded a free PDF book (When Coffee & Kale Compete), I got about 10 pages in and then started looking for the Kindle book. This was both as a way to thank the author (goodwill overflow) and so I could highlight (to help me retain info but potentially never read it).
I’ve tried experiments on one of my websites offering products for free but I ended up with about 3,000 people who weren’t interested in anything else. In other experiments, free has been a goldmine. I love this topic, thanks for bringing it up.
When I chatting to Brennan Dunn about pricing power for books, he casually dropped: "If you just read your book into a webcam and sold it as a video course, people would pay 10x as much." I was like, no way, but then... actually probably yes. There's some wild price anchoring at play in the different mediums.
For example, a short nonfiction book might be 30k words. And a long, detailed online article might be the same length, and the same usefulness. But people will pay $20 for the former and absolutely refuse to pay anything at all for the latter, just because they're positioned differently. I'm paying close attention to how https://www.holloway.com/ have been trying to release web versions of their books as first-class citizens while preserving the positioning and pricing power... As you say, a very interesting area with loads of nuance.
the utility factor seems to be an important lever. In a similar way that carrying a wallet with a bank card is easier than carrying a bag of gold, providing access to information in a format with less friction adds value and anchors the price.
Providing your book on a website as HTML is generous, handy for SEO but doesn’t provide as frictionless an experience as a PDF, book, course.
Have you seen any good frameworks that someone can use to repackage their writing/message/topic into free/email list wall/paywall and social/website/artefact/course/community/etc? I think it would be useful to see different models, similar to how you can study innovative business models…
I feel like each medium/format has some important nuance, and I haven't really seen a good way to automate or simplify the choices. (Even something as commonplace as how to handle information-rich diagrams in an audiobook can be non-trivial. Or footnotes, for that matter.)
I will say that when I did the video course for mom test, I tried to make it feel "different" from the book, which I think was a mistake. I was imagining that people would upgrade from book to course for a more team-based use-case, but in reality, people just go to their comfort format for the material, and some folks prefer video courses.
For the book-as-drip-email transition, I'm planning to do something like 10 chapters, 20 days, where one day is a chapter, and the day either before or after is more of a case study of someone applying that set of ideas/tools/lessons. And in the future, I might add a third day-per-chapter which is more worksheet/exercise/task-focused.
I agree with the comfort format comment and it must be tricky for people going from book > course content, wanting to avoid comments saying “I went through the course and it is 90% the same content, save yourself money and get the paperback/ebook”. I like your drip content mix of educate then ground in practical care studies!