December 18, 2010 01:22 PM

In the comments in my last blog, where I wrote about removing hooks, Ben Sharp said how he was disappointed to see when my book Driven came out at £20, and the download was £10.  I wondered if I was in fact being a greedy capitalist and should be selling it for a nominal amount or even just put the whole thing up on the site for free?

This of course is the dilemma with the web, in that so much information is put there for free we resent having to pay for it, even when it comes in the form of a solid object made from dead trees. The question also rises a more important point; that if you’ll only make a nominal return by giving it away free (ie in revenue from extra book or DVD sales), then you’ll put in a nominal amount of effort into the project.  This is the problem with many web sources, in that very often the information there is basic or poorly researched, or lacks any real depth or substance.  We get what we pay for - or what we don’t.

But when you charge £20 for a book you will put in a ton of effort because it has to be worth £20, and a book has to be as perfect as it can be.  Even then by trying to do your best; making it A4 and full colour, I only make £1.66 a copy when sold at retail or via Amazon - hardly a bankers bonus, but enough to make me believe it’s worth doing my best?

There is no climbing book like Driven, but Dave MaCleods 9 out of 10 climbers comes close in its nerdy focus (it also works on a print on demand model), and it’s a credit to Dave to take the time to write it.  Dave’s book is as basic a book as you can find, just text and the odd diagram, B&W and medium sized.  The text of course is good and took a long time to produce I expect, and it’s helped many climbers.  Dave’s book comes out at £15. I know some people will point out that Dave is simply wrote the book to make money, but then they would miss the point that almost all innovation is driven by commerce.  If no one buys Dave’s book, then he won’t do a second one.

With Driven you place your order and it’s printed on demand and posted to you, and if you want a PDF it’s downloaded straight away.  As the author I don’t have to shell out £10,000 on printing 4000 copies, and risk the books never selling (plus my kids bedroom already looks like the final sciene in Raider of the Lost Ark as it is!).  The downside is that the buyer needs to pay a slight premium for such a book to exist at all, and even then I take a big risk by plowing in a few months of work on something that may never sell (Driven was always a test bed for the concept of niche techy books).

Someone said that the book was like having me teach them everything I know about pegs - kind of a 1:1 session.  This begs the question what price do you put on all that knowledge?

“I may not be good - but I’m cheap”

Last week I did three days of big wall training down in London, and was shocked to see each session (working on a 4:1 ratio) was charged at £150 per person.  I emailed to ask if this wasn’t too much and was told that a normal instructor charged £40 and hour, and seeing that this was a specialist course and had a section of wall all to its self, and lasted from ten till five, and all gear was supplied, that it was a fair price.  I wonder what quality of course I’d have given if it was £150 for everyone?  The answer it wouldn’t have happened.

I know all this talk of money is distasteful, but I guess I’m trying to say that I don’t think £20 is too much for something like Driven, which is both based on twenty years hard fought experience, and is as indepth as a book can be. But just to show that I’m not a fat cat I’ll reduce the PDF version of the book from £10 to the price of an overpriced coffee at £2.99 (just to be transparent I get £1.86 of that). 

Information - good information - well edited, in-depth, and well illustrated needs some way of being produced.  It won’t work in mags, it’s too niche for normal publishing, and people don’t like pay walls on the web, and so far this looks like the way to go. I’d be really interested in hearing what people think about this.

Kim Graves | 12/18/10

My feeling is let them complain and not buy the book if they don’t want to. NO author, unless your John Grisham or J.K. Rowling, makes any money writing a book. You write because you have something to say and want to share it. I wrote one 8 years ago and was told by the publisher that it would make $40K.  So I put $40K worth of time and materials into the book - as a result it’s a best seller in it’s class often in the top 10; always in the top 100 on Amazon even 8 years later.  Over the years, we’ve made about $1200/year on that book.  We’re no where near the $40K that we spent writing it.  My book would need to be five times the price that it is for me to have broken even!  Don’t drop your price Andy.  /rant.

Shane | 12/18/10

Making a book commercially viable must be every authors goal.

Too many people expect something for nothing these days. But there are those, like I and many others, who will be willing to pay the price.. not only by reasearching/investing in our hobbies but by training for our goals. Thus you get my full support.

Well done Andy.. Good for you…

Ben Sharp | 12/18/10

Hi Andy, thankyou very much for taking the time to respond to my comment. I hope I didn’t give the impression that I’m not willing to pay for quality material; my comment was motivated by not really understanding how Driven was more expensive than (for e.g.) Mountaineering by Alun Richardson or your own psychovertical and I didn’t mean to imply that you were a greedy capitalist!
You raise an interesting point about technical or niche books and how much people are willing to pay for them. If you wrote 5 then personally £20 would be too much for me, despite preferring to have the book than the download. Learning that you get a mere £1.66 per copy would make me feel even more reluctant to shell out £100 knowing that so little of the money I spent would find it’s way to the person who put in the work. I suppose this is the same with all books but something which I’d not really thought about.
Maybe £20 isn’t too much considering the amount of work that went into it but, probably like many others, I tend to arrive at a “right price” by comparing similar items. The problem is that this makes a niche text seem overpriced because books that sell more can be sold at incedibly cheap prices.
I will be buying the download version and look forward to reading it (however I would happily pay a little more). As I said, I’d rather have the book on the shelf but maybe that’s a bit old fashioned now and I should embrace literary downloads more, at least more of the money goes to the author.
Thankyou again for taking the time to respond and also for being so candid about the amount you earn from the sale of your book which was something I didn’t realise. I hope you do continue with the series as you have a rare, bull free way of passing on information that can’t be found anywhere else.
Ben

Gareth Hanson | 12/18/10

Knowing how time consuming it can be to produce good content, I’m 100% behind you on this one Andy.

£20 for a physical book is not expensive and dropping the price will only serve to devalue the effort you have put in.

Stick to yer guns mate!

Cheers, Gareth

jasen jordan | 12/18/10

It would be interesting to see how many items of AID gear you could buy for £20 ? 
If someone wanted the information in this book then they certainly must have a vested interest in this area , so to turn it down on price seems ludicrous…Given that this is one persons lifetime vocation collected into a single book surely commands the respect and price to go along side.

Wyatt | 12/19/10

As a beginning climber I seek out all the knowledge I can, and I find that the knowledge in a book like this is far more valuable than much pricier gear that I’ll use way less.  And even though I’ve never placed a pin in my life - and don’t plan to very much - and I’m somewhat put off by the price since I won’t use it much, I will probably end up getting the print version of Driven.  Not only is it beautiful and full of super technical information (the kind of stuff I gobble up whenever I can get my hands on it), but I just want Andy to put out the rest in the series, cause I’m EXTREMELY interested in what those will have to say.

Maxim | 12/19/10

Andy, thanks the book, I think PDF is the way to go. To me, as long as there is an option to purchase PDF at a reasonable price, availability of paper edition is more of an extra convinience which justifies the cost.

Mike | 12/19/10

Andy,
I have just bought Driven as a .pdf after seeing your comment on Twitter.  I hadn’t realised the background behind the price, etc.

I have got ‘Driven’ on my list of books to buy, and I still intend to, but money is tight at the moment (and, my wife would argue, so am I).  The .pdf is a stop-gap because, basically, I’m ‘old school’ and I still want to have that physical reference on my shelf next to my other outdoor and climbing books.

So, if people want the book enough, they should pay for the paper copy.  If they aren’t sure, get the .pdf.  At least there’s a choice.

I have only ever placed a peg once - and I totally f**ked it up.  To my shame, I wrecked the placement and Yvon Chouinard will rightfully haunt me for this reason.  I wish I’d read Driven first…

Matthew Traver | 12/19/10

I think your book represents good value for money and there is no reason you should de-value your hard work.

I think much like a specialist equipment manufacturer targeting a niche segment (say PHD), although their prices may be seen as steeper than the norm by some, what the customer is getting is a product that has been consciously made with care and passion - just like Driven.

I just bought the download version (not because I’m cheap, but so I can read it on a Kindle!).

Hopefully you’ll produce more books like this in the future. Keep it up.

Matt

Tom | 12/19/10

I think if you’ve put the graft in, then £2.99 for the PDF is too hard on you as the author! I’d quite happily pay more, and think £5-8 for the PDF would still be good value.

Mat | 12/20/10

I have bought a few photography eBooks (well more like supplements) for $5 each - but I suspect your book probably has a signifcantly smaller audience and so you need a higher price to derive any kind of financial reward for your efforts. I probably would stump up a tenner quite happily (were aid climbing my thing), but £20 seems a bit too much and if you can get the PDF for 1/2 the price then for me that would be the way to go.

I did by Dave’s 9/10 climbers book. And while £15 wasn’t excessive, it probably was at the upper end of the price range for a mono, text only book. However, having said that, the content is excellent - but I recently discovered much of it was already available on the web on the MCOS site in other articles which kind of makes £15 seem a bit pricey now. So a tenner for a PDF of info not available elsewhere (and presumably highly useful for aspiring aid climbers) seems fair enough. Good luck to you.

Adrian T | 12/21/10

I paid £16 for me and my girlfriend to listen to you talk for a couple of hours… Maybe you should do an audio book? smile

Seriously, £20 is cheap for a niche text. The guy who thinks he is comparing like for like isn’t. He should be looking at specialist scientific publishing,university press, technical manuals etc and if he does so he will find out that they often sell for ten times that.

I haven’t bought Driven, but if I ever get into aid climbing i will buy it happily for £20.

Tom | 12/22/10

With no intention of aid climbing my motivation for buying the book is purely interest in Andy’s writing. Psycho Vertical was both humorous and moving, so chances are the same humour will be interwoven within Driven. And in all honesty I would wish to support anyone producing anything so interesting on such a niche topic.

To anyone undecided lulu are offering 20% off any purchases until the end of December: BEREMARKABLE305

Conor | 12/30/10

Just buying the ‘Driven’ pdf right now. Even if mainly to help you decide to produce the rest of the techy books you had planned.

I will definately buy paper copies of the one on winter and the one on descending.

Joshua Kelly | 01/04/11

I think that the £2.99 price tag on the download is about right. I’d never have considered buying it for £20, or a tenner because I’m not really a good enough climber to benefit from it.
But when it’s available cheaply it becomes extremely hard to justify not learning something a little irrelivant, but all the same interesting. The style of writing (especially the little anacdotes) and layout made it for me, I’d be tempted to order a paper copy if I lose the file of it now.

Chris | 01/05/11

I bought it for £20 and I thinks it’s a fair price.
Simple as that.

cheers

Neil Newton Tayor | 01/09/11

Climbers (and mountain bikers) will pay extortionate amounts of money for lightweight high strength components which will lighten their load on the rock (or trail). People seem not to realize that knowledge weighs nothing at all and if you make the effort to keep it up to date you will have it for a lifetime of use. Who can say that about a karabiner or an ice axe.

I think that a .pdf book should at least be the same price as a karabiner, (a tenner) and that a good book can be priced as high as a ATC guide or half the price of a new ice axe pick (20 quid).

Keep up the good work Andy