Robin Sloan

Tan­gent from another indus­try: The power of the Release day — and “the release” as an Event — is prob­a­bly the most sig­nif­i­cant rea­son that piracy hurts the music indus­try IMHO. It’s not sales that are lost [insert link here to report about the pos­i­tive mar­ket­ing pow­ers of pirated music], but it is the loss of con­trol of the main Event asso­ci­ated with new music, and thus the loss of con­trol over the artist-​​fan Rela­tion­ship around that pow­er­ful Event. And the con­clu­sion here is not that the music indus­try should fight piracy, but that the music indus­try should do some­thing rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent than a stan­dard Release Day to regain con­trol of the Event around music releases to drive the Experience.

So, the Release Day is a pow­er­ful Event, that should be tuned and man­aged and con­trolled for con­sumer Expe­ri­ence. Agreed? Agreed.

Why then would you aim to model after Harry Pot­ter and Ama­zon? True, they have not lost con­trol of the expe­ri­ence as has the music indus­try, but that is only because the physical/​digital tip­ping point is in their favor and they still con­trol dis­tri­b­u­tion tightly — it is NOT because they are some ideal to model after. Yes, indeed, they do have it down to a beau­ti­ful sci­ence. It is beau­ti­fully effi­cient in a soul­less, cold, and mechan­i­cal way how they can get a copy into the hands of any­one who wants one on day zero. (I also love that they can get me my new shoes in time for the ball tomor­row night!) But, Mr Media Inven­tor, there is hardly any­thing inno­v­a­tive in their Release Expe­ri­ence. In fact, I would call it more of an expe­ri­ence than an Expe­ri­ence. (Side note: Is there any­thing sad­der than a low­er­case word sit­ting in the mid­dle of a sen­tence star­ing up long­ingly at a title-​​cased ver­sion of itself?)

If you think about the Release as an Event and then let your mind go wild with how much fun you can have con­trol­ling that Expe­ri­ence, I think you’ll agree there is so much more poten­tial there than instant avail­abil­ity. (Although I would like a copy for the ball tomor­row night so if you could nail effi­cient deliv­ery on top of build­ing a con­sumer expe­ri­ence that would be grand.)

robot-​​ninja out

Great Points All Around, RNFS-​​45238!

I’m won­der­ing if the “ways” for indies to do ship­ping right… is to out­source the ship­ping to ser­vices that focus on ship­ping.. like a woot-​​like provider that might serve a bunch of indie solo artists… (or even Ama­zon itself, I guess)

But every mid­dle­man takes a cut… so min­i­miz­ing the num­ber of steps between the author/​artist and the fan should still play a fac­tor in these cal­cu­la­tions.. hmmm.

Aha, but in this par­tic­u­lar case, I really think a middle-​​man would actu­ally end up cost­ing an indie cre­ator less—because there are SUCH economies of scale w/​ ship­ping. If there was an easy-​​to-​​use indie merch ful­fill­ment ser­vice such as you describe, I’d use it for sure.

One of the things I’m really dig­ging so far about Annabel Scheme is how the way the book is pack­aged becomes part of the story. Not only the sta­tic shield around the book itself, but the color of the mail­ing enve­lope and the return address on it really set the tone for the story. Even though I’ve only had time to read a few pages so far, I’m really excited — the book came with its own “unbox­ing” expe­ri­ence, just like a cool new gad­get. I’m not sure Ama­zon would give you the same free­dom to exper­i­ment with the pre­sen­ta­tion of your product.