This is a response to a comment at TorrentFreak about TorrentBoy, so please excuse the unscheduledness of it.
TorrentBoy: Zombie World was released in March of 2009, and since then, it’s been downloaded over 250,000 times. For the sake of simplicity we’ll count each one of those downloads as a unique person.
592 people have donated money after reading Zombie World. The most common donation is $9, with a grand total of $9,636.32 (after PayPal fees). Around $2,000 of that was in the first 30 days. 0.2368% of my readers donate, but they tend to donate more than I would have made in royalties from a regularly-published book ($1.79 per copy).
Put in perspective: a typical advance for a book of this kind is $5,000. Odds are, I wouldn’t see royalties at all. So right now I’m $4600 ahead of where I would have been under the traditional “pay first” model. Also, under this system, I have a lot more readers than your typical book aimed at this market. Canadian best-sellers ship 5,000 copies. I’ve already done that, fifty times over.
Can I live off $9,600 a year? No. I’d have to write a new TorrentBoy book (with the same rate of success) every three months or so, and even that would be cutting it close. Under this system, you need to produce constantly, or you don’t survive. I happen to enjoy producing, so it’s not a big deal for me… but as a replicable model, it’s not quite fully-formed yet.
The thing that stuns me about the whole situation is how much of this money has come from (what I assume to be) BitTorrent fans. These are people you’d assume are hardcore pirates, pillagers of “intellectual property” and enemies of artists everywhere. Instead, they have sent me donations without coaxing, and made my little TorrentBoy experiment a big success. It may not happen again, but I think it puts a twist in the theory that pirates are immoral leeching psychopaths 
Free works. I’m going to be trying “freemium” later this month with The Vector (where you can bypass the serialized scheduled by donating $5), but thus far I have no reason to bother trying to lock down anything I do. Treat your audience with respect, and they’ll do the same to you. Treat them like criminals, and they’ll take great pride in watching you squirm.
Interesting – I know we've talked about this before – owning your rights fully is where the real value is gonna be.
How big is Rollbots in Canada btw? I have no idea how to look up such numbers. I'm excited to get it here in the States.
Actually, I have no idea how to look up such numbers either. From what I gather, it's doing really well. We'll get better information in the States though.. they report ratings a lot more reliably with American TV.
I'm becoming a huge fan – I love the creative work obviously – we share a mania or two – but this blog is a terrific read in its own right.
WTF is with that pic? It makes no sense!
Made a calculation
To earn that amount of money on royalties alone you would need to sell about 5300-5400 copies. Since best-sellers sell around 5000 according to you, then WOW! what a seller!
Also made a calculation based of the prepaid method and then you would have needed to sell about high 2500 (almost 2600) books in royalties to have the same “income”. That would mean your book would need to be sold ½ as good as a best-seller.
With this information I can clearly see the advantage of the release FREE.
Mr J
The pic is what came up when I did a search for “success” on Flickr.
I guess everyone defines success in their own way…
Cool! Thanks for the math work! So not only am I ahead of the game in number of reads, but I'm also ahead in cash too. That's a pretty good statistic.
Free doesn't work for everything (at least not right now), but it's definitely working for me!
Hey, MCM Thanks for pointing me here. Your comment on the BitTorrent fans hits the nail on the head. NME ran an article in the wake of Pirate Bay's murder that demosntrated the people who download most free songs (including pirated file-shares) also buy most music. It's a no-brainer.
How's about this for a model. Calculate how much you need as an income. Post it. Offer your work for free, with a “pay me” option, and have the “earnings so far” show on your screen.
I would love to have your involvement in Free-e-day (http://www.freeeday.wordpress.com), the online independent culture festival on December 1st, at which independent writers/musicians/filmmakers all give something away for free on the same day – combined with a series of live free events to showacse the diversity of indie talent there is to the world.
I like your “pay me” idea… the thing that makes me pause is the question of whether people will respond the way you'd expect. Based on previous experience, I think a lot of people like the idea of X for Y, as opposed to X, and Y is available. If that makes sense. Donations on TorrentBoy were a direct relation to TorrentBoy itself, not because they wanted to support ME…. well, no, they did, they just wanted to support my TorrentBoy work more than anything.
Hmm.
I think I may give it a try. I just need to pick a number
As for Free-e-day, I am SO in. I signed up on Facebook and am ready to roll! Excellent idea! I'll get something extra special for December 1st…
Hey, MCM Thanks for pointing me here. Your comment on the BitTorrent fans hits the nail on the head. NME ran an article in the wake of Pirate Bay's murder that demosntrated the people who download most free songs (including pirated file-shares) also buy most music. It's a no-brainer.
How's about this for a model. Calculate how much you need as an income. Post it. Offer your work for free, with a “pay me” option, and have the “earnings so far” show on your screen.
I would love to have your involvement in Free-e-day (http://www.freeeday.wordpress.com), the online independent culture festival on December 1st, at which independent writers/musicians/filmmakers all give something away for free on the same day – combined with a series of live free events to showacse the diversity of indie talent there is to the world.
I like your “pay me” idea… the thing that makes me pause is the question of whether people will respond the way you'd expect. Based on previous experience, I think a lot of people like the idea of X for Y, as opposed to X, and Y is available. If that makes sense. Donations on TorrentBoy were a direct relation to TorrentBoy itself, not because they wanted to support ME…. well, no, they did, they just wanted to support my TorrentBoy work more than anything.
Hmm.
I think I may give it a try. I just need to pick a number
As for Free-e-day, I am SO in. I signed up on Facebook and am ready to roll! Excellent idea! I'll get something extra special for December 1st…