Bad news, both for readers and writers, is that Sturgeon’s Law (“90 percent of everything is crap”) is, in this case, floating at the 99.99 percent mark.

It’s tempting to put your Wonderful Book out there in this form, but even if it didn’t suck, it would be like pissing in the ocean without some major marketing work to somehow stand out from the crowd. There are people who have hit it big this way. I think about twelve.

I ain’t that hungry yet.

It’s not an “irrational” market. Something has just gotten very cheap that didn’t used to be.

It’s why I’m wrapping fish in the same metal Napoleon III used to make his formal tableware settings out of.

Digital Changes Everything…here’s a concrete number that goes a long way toward explaining the craziness: 10 cents.

10 cents is Amazon’s retail rate for a gigabyte of cloud; a gigabyte of storage per month, a gigabyte of bandwidth used. 10 cents per gigabyte. I’ll use it as a benchmark without trying to guess Amazon’s actual cost; it’s useful to have a fudge factor for overhead anyway.

Amazon sells videos that average around 2 gigabytes in size, so it costs them 20 cents/month to keep a video in inventory, and 20 cents each time somebody buys or rents the video, at a minimum of $1.99 each time.

Ebooks are considerably smaller than videos. Direct cost to Amazon for putting an eBook in the catalog is a fractional penny or so per month, while their list prices tend to be multiples of video prices (go figure).

So, Frank, you might say that because of crazy digital economics, every digital product is added to inventory “on spec”. For the Product Manager the logic is simple: Put everything that comes your way into the catalog, and see what happens. Stuff that doesn’t sell costs you practically nothing, while the profits are insane for anything that sells at all well. Drink heavily to feel better about being unable to explain to anybody how you make a living.

Have you ever started paging through Amazon search results, and realized that they never end? Amazon’s digital catalog is so deep that if you start with a fairly general search, you just keep going, and eventually you’ll leave behind the familiar world of products you know through commercial success by people you’ve heard of, into a fantastic world of direct-to-digital videos and garage band MP3s and self-published ebooks…a realm created out of nothing by the weird economics of digital products.

OooohOOOhhhoooohh…..

I’m assuming most of the low price books are self published or maybe accepted on spec by Amazon. I have bought a few and some are not bad. Some of the writers are quite prolific with 4-5 titles for sale