Technology for People – Not Just Corporations
Selling Your Own Digital Downloads – Your Way
Making Digital Downloads Pay You:
Do you have a book, video or CD (programming ideas - hacks - visuals - technical - novels - short stories - scripts - poetry - non fiction - music - movies etc.) in English or almost any other language that you want to publish as a digital download?
I know I do. I have ideas all the time – some of them are already completed and ready to go. I know you have ideas and projects too.
Over a year ago I started researching how I could do this myself – because I want my projects to be just that – My projects. I don't want them to have to fit some mold or formula that a label or publisher or studio requires. I have enough confidence that if I put up enough of my own work – the way I want it to be – that I will find an audience that appreciates what I do and will appreciate that I do it my way.
Besides – unless you're already famous, does anyone still trust that you will get a fair deal from the big labels, studios or publishers? There are probably a few that might treat you OK but its gotten to the point that I don't trust labels enough to put their CD's directly in my computer.
My recent experience with the digital book sites is that even when they express an interest in my work they are incredibly slow and unresponsive. I'm talking months to make any headway at all. They don't return phone calls. They don't return emails for weeks – and thats after they say they have an interest. Most of them make it clear that they are primarily interested in selling works put out by major book publishers.
I contacted a company that is a major player in music digital downloads. I discovered that they don't want to talk directly to independents. I finally got routed through to the department that could give me the information that I wanted about what the terms are to be carried by them. I got a voicemail greeting that told me to leave a message and, If they were interested in talking to me they would call back. When I got back to a live operator on the phone and asked what I had to do to get a real person in that department I was told that they do not give out direct phone numbers – only numbers that go to voice mail.
We all know that millions of dollars are being spent monthly on digital downloads. But who's getting the money? Its clear that the major digital download sites are working closely with major labels, studios and publishers and continue to freeze out anyone who is not signed with them or already famous or well known.
If you produce music, videos or written and graphic publications or if you only buy books, music and videos, do you Really believe that the only work worth buying is work that is controlled by major corporations?
This is similar to the argument that only professional journalists who work for commercial or government sponsored news organizations can find and present real news. But reality is already showing us that people on the Internet who have areas of interest that they pursue in their own way, unhampered, unfettered and not controlled by major news outlets are improving our ability to get a broader and deeper spectrum of information that serves our interests as individual citizens. Two of the United States most honored newspapers are having to answer questions about their most senior and influential reporters credibility – questions that were forced into the open, in large part by non professionals who put their information on the Internet – they raised important questions and demanded answers. The question is being debated hotly whether any of these people are journalists – most do not claim to be – but they have certainly raised the level of the quality of any reporting that claims to be unbiased and factual.
The same kind of effect is about to happen in the music, video and publishing fields.
As Chris, over at longtail.com has demonstrated, it has been in the business interests of the majors to limit the number of their acts and authors because to be most profitable they needed to produce big hits – superstars – best sellers. So they created a series of controls that choked off anyone who wasn't in their system.
In a world of physical, analog duplication that made sense. It costs money to physically produce, duplicate, warehouse, transport and display physical books and discs. Many, if not most of the titles produced do not sell enough to pay for themselves, so big hits were needed to make the whole process profitable – or so they claim.
The labels, studios and publishers decided who they would let in. If you couldn't get in with them you didn't exist. Why? In music, if you weren't with a label you didn't get played on the radio. If you weren't on the radio, no one had heard of you and you couldn't get in the record stores. If you weren't in the record stores you didn't sell records.
A similar dynamic played out with books and movies. No publisher or studio behind you, no way to let people know you existed and your book didn't get in the book stores and your film didn't get in the theaters.
Along the way, a sad thing happened. Creative people and consumers were taught to believe that if you weren't with a big corporation you weren't real, you weren't legitimate, your work was inferior. In publishing, “vanity” publishers, we were told, were for people whose work was substandard, but who were so vain that they would pay to have their shoddy, pitiful, uncool work produced anyway.
But when, if ever, have major corporations ever really been out front with what was cool, hot, hip or whatever the current term is?
Never. The big corporations have always wanted to snuff our whatever was new and exciting until they could imitate it, control it – make money for themselves with it. Seldom do the real people who originally created a movement make anything.
Now we have digital downloads. We have computer studios and editing systems – word processors – digital cameras. All these outputs can be sold as digital downloads. When we create things with these tools do we Really need to get the blessing of a major corporation to give our work value? As producers of creative work do we have to feel inferior if we don't give control of our work to someone else?
Old habits and conditioning are hard to kill. But as humans we have a unique and precious ability to overcome our prior conditioning and ingrained habits. Most animals have various tropisms and instincts that they have very little or no control over. But we can change.
Under the old model – analog hard copy duplication and physical transport/distribution there were practical reasons for wanting to get the blessing of the corporates. Money. Every step of the process was expensive and, to get any money back, you had to get your work into a large number of stores and theaters around the world. As an independent, even if we could get 5,000 stores or 500 theaters to display our work we simply couldn't afford the duplication and transport costs to do it. Plus the advertising/marketing costs to excite/educate people to find it and buy it.
Digital Downloads have changed all of that. An individual has the same power to display digital wares 24/7 to an international audience as a large corporation does. But how can I protect the content so it can only be downloaded after it's paid for?
This question became important to me from two different perspectives. First, I had been associated with a site that sold CD's produced by independent artists. Because of that site I became acutely aware of how expensive/risky/painful it is to ship individual CD's around the world. Often, the cost of the CD is not the issue – the cost/hassle of shipping the CD is. The first few CD's that we shipped to Europe, New Zealand and Australia convinced me that there had to be a better, faster and less expensive way.
Second, and personally far more more important in some ways, was my interest in selling my own work. If it was audio or video I know that I don't want to have to duplicate a zillion CD's or DVD's and try to distribute them to hundreds of outlets – I looked at different ways of doing that – find the cheapest duplicating service – buy my own duplicating machines – none of it made any sense. I would still have to ship them everywhere – if I could make the arrangements with outlets – sell them either on consignment and trust that the money would come in (possibly) – or sell them wholesale with the right to return (unlikely).
Since this clearly was not a smart way to go – and I'd already tried various things with printed projects, I started looking for a way; that I could set up and sell digital downloads that bypassed the bottleneck of the sites that were really only interested in working with major corporations.
What I found was sobering. One company wanted on the magnitude of $150,000 for a license to use their software and another $10,000 to $12,000 per month for support. Spending $200,000 to $300,000 was not an option for me. Further research showed a way to do this for $2,000 to $3,000 per month. But still, I couldn't see how we would ever break even because that was just the floor rate, it would not allow enough sales volume to break even.
I found a number of packages that were incomplete or so clunky that no one would use them.
Oddly, and only because I had not thought about it, I found that the companies that knew the most about content protection and payment systems were companies that had a background servicing the Internet pornography industry. Well, I guess somebody had to do it.
Finally I found a system that was mature and I was able to get a reasonable cost on the licenses, plus a way to integrate a billing/payment system that accepts credit cards and that will automatically split the royalties out for the artist and issue their royalty checks. It's less than $1,000 per month to maintain and ready for me to start.
Still – the monthly fees are more than I can reasonably carry myself. But part of my motivation was to find a way for many of us to offer our work – more people are likely to visit a site with a wide variety of offerings than if it's just one person's work.
Rather than trying to determine what people will buy and download my role is that of moderator – to protect the site from offensive material that would alienate visitors from all the other projects that are offered. There are enough pornography sites out there already, so we don't need to carry that.
In this awesome universe of all the users of the Internet who also like to write, create visual art, videos and music, I only need 125 to 150 creative souls who are not afraid of deciding for themselves that their work has merit – who would like to be able to afford to spend more time creating – and see that paid downloads give them a potential return for their work.
Are you confident and independent enough to put your work up as paid digital downloads?
My approach is simple:
*You must own the rights to sell the work as a digital download.
*You keep your rights – I have a licensing agreement with you that allows me to sell the work for you for 12 months.
*This is not an exclusive agreement – You can offer your work on other sites or anywhere else, in any form that you want to. That's entirely your business.
*You get 60% of the sale price. Paid monthly, not quarterly, not once or twice a year.
*Set up Cost for Books, magazines issues, graphic collections (digitized artwork – Photographic collections etc) is $75.00.
*Set up Cost for audio or video is $100.00. Very large video files may be more. Music – up to 10 tracks per title – tracks may be sold individually.
*You decide the price.
*You decide if you want the project to stay up past 12 months. There will be a prorated monthly fee to cover storage costs after the initial 12 months has elapsed if you want to contue offering the work after 12 months has elapsed.
This means that you have no duplicating or printing costs and No shipping or physical transportation costs when something sells.
This means that you can put up several projects without risking a lot of your money.
This means that when you produce something that people like, they can pay you and download your work just like they download work that is controlled by major corporations.
Look at the difference in the economics. Suppose you put up a music collection of 10 of your songs. This costs you $100. One of your songs becomes popular and sells just 1,000 downloads at $1.00 per download. You make $600 from that one song. 10,000 downloads of that song makes you $6,000. Because of the low set up you may decide to put up several song collections of 10 songs each. Then, you get to see which songs sell the best. You might then take those songs and sell them as a collection in other markets, or use them to show a label that you sell, if you still want to give up control to them.
This process of being able to put up many projects to see what sells best is called testing. If you had to spend thousands of dollars to physically duplicate each title, you couldn't produce and offer a large enough variety to test, and since you couldn't sell each track separately, you could not find out that even though 9 of the tracks weren't as exciting as you thought – one of them was a best seller.
Book and magazine and visual artists who used to have expensive printing costs can do the same. Now you don't have to spend thousands of dollars to physically reproduce your work. You can put lots of titles up at $75 each. Now you can test – which of your 3 or 4 book ideas will sell – now you can find out. Then, of course, there are people who already know they have something that people really like because of their presence on the Internet - now they no longer have to be in a position where they have to give everything away - programming - hacks - visuals - technical - and the costs can be reasonable, like shareware.
I want to do the same thing. I want to put my audio and video projects up – let the public listen to or watch a portion and buy and download it if they want to hear or see the rest. I want to put my book up and let them read the first chapter and let them buy and download it if they want to see or read the rest. It doesn't matter if its fiction or non fiction – Poetry or scientific or technical how to – black and white or color.
For the life me – I don't see how there aren't 125 to 150 other creative souls who aren't dying to try this out with this low risk. I believe that you are out there and that you're as excited about this as I am.
I'm inviting you to please join me in this adventure – I'm tired of the big corporate players getting all the play time.
Ready? Just email me – put Digital Download Project in the subject line so I will know you're not spam.
Let me know what your project is and we will make arrangements for you to forward the digital file to me. You can pay the set up through the papal button in the sidebar or send me a check or money order – whichever you prefer.
I want you to join me – Lets make more projects – make more money with our projects and make history with our success together – As independents – in full control of our own work.
