Kickstarter eliminates the risk that publishers and booksellers face. They have limited resources and limited shelf space, and Kickstarter is proof to them that something is going to work.
Seth Godin
Kickstarter eliminates the risk
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Given his track record with pronouncements about publishing, I’m going to take anything Godin says about future publishing with a 10kg bag of sodium chloride.
Godin is, at his core, a publicity-and-marketing dork who firmly and honestly believes that It’s All About Branding; quality, convenience, value, price, etc. are irrelevant. That shows in both his pronouncements about publishing and his… ok, toning down for the family audience… products he has published.
In short: There’s no chance whatsoever of the fallacy of Argument From Authority applying here because Godin has none — at least none in publishing.
I hadn’t noticed anything he had written for a very long time, CE.
This could be a good test of the Fallacy of Composition. Kickstarter worked for Author-X, so it will work for lots of other authors.
That isn’t actually the fallacy of composition. However, it is still one whopper of a fallacy, so your point stands.
That’s an ambiguous sentence somehow. I didn’t know that publishers OR booksellers used Kickstarter. I can’t imagine that being part of a business plan.
It is much more an indie thing, isn’t it?
I’ll have to go look to see if small traditional publishers have them.
I didn’t see the ambiguity at all. The underlying message is: ‘It’s not our job to take any risk at all. The onus is 100% on you, the author, to prove that your book will be successful in the marketplace. Then, and only then, we will step in and offer you a contract that will give us most of the guaranteed profits.’
Not all tradpubs are BPHs.
Small presses can do crowd funding too, not just Indies.
And in the comics world some have with at least one corporate publisher (Archie Comics) dabbling in it. If its not common it might be fairly soon:
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/how-established-creators-major-publishers-are-changing-kickstarter/
Kickstarter also eliminates the author’s need for someone else’s capital, which leaves the publisher with literally nothing to do. Online bookshops have unlimited shelf space and colossal resources, and don’t need proof that something is going to work. The other booksellers frankly don’t move enough books to make a difference. So why would anyone with a successful Kickstarter let anyone in after the fact to claim the lion’s share of the profits?
Recall the story of The Little Red Hen.
Brilliant way to illustrate this. Once I started reading I couldn’t stop. Thanks for a wonderful memory.
And thank you, Sir!