The problem I have with PWYW is not that most people, the vast majority, don’t pay anything, but rather that the concept of it drives everyone into a downward pricing spiral because it’s very hard to compete with “free, if you want”. I think it creates conditions in which authors feel it is necessary to give their stuff away for free just because they feel they have no other choice. Because if you charge something, but no one buys it because they have access to multitudes of free stuff (or PWYW), then what’s the point if the result is you get 2 people downloading your product. Instead, the thinking goes, I’ll put it out there for nothing, and hope more people check it out, and this earns me a cool reputation and so when I put other stuff out… um … maybe I can charge later because people already like my stuff? And that, in fact, can work… like offering a free sample taste of cookies in the supermarket. But most of the time I think the result is 1 in 100 pay anything, and roughly the same number comment, and other than that, nothing much happens. Meanwhile, everyone else is also forced down that road.

Maybe this is a general problem with self publishing overall. The easier it gets to publish, the more publishers there are, the more products there are, and the less people in the market will focus on any one thing, and so the rate of time vs benefit diminishes inevitably as a result. But I think that PWYW accelerates that trend significantly. Of course, I’m just speculating about this. I don’t have hard numbers to back up my supposition.

Nor actually do I have a solution to offer. It may be that this trend of racing to the bottom in terms of price (and therefore profit) is inevitable. I hope not, because I suspect that the end result of that process is that people come to the conclusion that spending the time and effort to produce cool stuff isn’t worth it if what they produce must be given away for free. And I wonder what amazing things might have come along had there been the feasibility of being able to make something from the effort.

On the other hand, it is also possible that the major factor in all of this is Quality. People who produce really quality goods may simply be able to charge, and people will buy it, because it’s good stuff. So that would lead me to ask myself … If I feel I have to push this out there under PWYW … am I really saying that it’s because I really haven’t really polished this or completed it enough so that people would normally pay something for it? And if that is the case, then PWYW is the equivalent of putting a “Amature Level” sign on it. Which may be ok for people who just want to throw things out there, and sometimes we all do, but … not for anything you really hope to make a profit from.

ok… that was random. Sorry. :p I should probably polish this up. But I have work to do, and … gosh, I better get back to it. :p