But in thinking about David’s post, I can’t help but remember that promotion can also be used in the wrong way. In the Mormon context, publishers and authors face significant cultural and ethical dilemmas in promoting their work.

Frequently Church members assume that if cultural works have been produced to further the gospel, they should be given away for free, or at low cost. While there is certainly a role for giving works away for free, there are also significant disadvantages to giving works away for free. Probably the major disadvantage is the lack of promotion — unless someone is promoting a work, the number of copies distributed is very limited; and when a work is given away for free, there are rarely any funds available for or effort put into promotion.

Given the need for some kind of promotion, it is no surprising the efforts that publishers and some authors go to in promoting their work. Any promotion at all sometimes feels like its ethically wrong. And since the Church prohibits using its facilities and member lists for commercial purposes, most promotion aimed at LDS Church members seems somehow wrong. While not quite priestcraft, is it wrong to use the fact of Church membership to earn money?

While that dilemma is in the back of the minds of publishers and authors, they also struggle with the dilemmas associated with the text itself, especially, should the text be crafted for a particular target audience? If an author does so, has he remained true to his muse? What if instead the elements targeted to an audience aren’t crucial to the message or ideas in the work? If I want to target college-age LDS women at BYU, should I work in a BYU angle, even if the book is set in Europe?

Many dilemmas that we face in life come down to simple conventions in our community — that is, what our friends and neighbors, helpers and customers, expect. But successful promotion often relies on the unexpected. One graphic design book I read years ago said that the key to great design is knowing all the rules of good design, and breaking at least one. Promotion is also like that — these days if you don’t break one of the rules, no one pays attention. But there is an art to knowing which rule to break, since many of these rules will either yield ethical dilemmas or turn off the audience.

Over the years, I’ve seen a number of promotional efforts used by LDS publishers and authors, some of them seemed questionable. Here are some examples:

* Prospecting at church — talking to anyone who will listen about your work, so that you can judge their interest and call those interested later to make a sale.

* Simply letting others know about your latest work — in the hope that they will look for it later.

* Handing out business cards or flyers, or posting them on bulletin boards.

* Reading passages from your work in classes, at firesides or homemaking meetings.

* Giving presentations on the same subject (but not necessarily mentioning the book) in classes, at firesides or homemaking meetings.

* Collecting email or physical addresses from Church directories because “I know them personally, I’m just looking up the address of a friend.”

* Years ago, I saw one Internet-based promotion in which  Church members were asked to give the advertiser the name and address of their Bishop.

I’m sure you that read this post will know of other promoting techniques, both ethical and not. I’d be very interested to hear them. What techniques have you used or heard of?

These economic issues are, of course, a major problem for the expansion of Mormon culture. Mormonism continues to expand quickly in less developed countries, but our culture isn’t keeping up with that expansion. LDS books, films, music and other cultural elements are largely not available outside the US and Canada, leading many to suggest a radical solution:

Just give these products away for free!

Unfortunately, I don’t think this will work in the long run. Its not sustainable, it doesn’t help local members grow, and it often cheats authors and producers of any way to make a living from their work.

I’m not against free. It is a great policy in many cases. You don’t seek compensation when someone is starving. Free is also generally good when you are teaching the gospel.

In the business world, free is also frequently part of a business model. Products are given away free to get consumers to purchase other items or to increase awareness of a business. But free can also be used competitively — to put a competitor out of business or to dissuade them from competing.

So, free can be both a postitive and a negative force. In fact, I believe that both positive and negative consequences follow whenever things are given away for free. Giving something away for free means not only that you aren’t selling it, but also that others aren’t likely to sell it, or may have some difficulty selling it.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have run into sites that try to solve the lack of distribution by taking books, movies, etc. (often regardless of copyright law) and posting them to websites where supposedly anyone can download and read them. Free certainly covers the economic difficulty that many local church members face.

The tactic of making ebooks and electronic versions of products and distributing them seems sound in other ways also. The use of the internet as a distribution mechanism is still in its infancy, and its use, even in the third world, is still growing. Many people also believe that ebooks will soon replace most printed books.

But, there are costs to this tactic. Free may be good for a single title, or a single business or distributor. But it isn’t necessarily good for all titles or for developing an infrastructure that helps new titles to exist in the future. Its similar to the proverb about teaching a man to fish instead of giving out fish. If you give away products, where will future products come from?

In thinking about this sistuation I do make some assumptions. I assume that at some point in the future LDS products will be distributed all over the world, at least in part by companies trying to make money, and that authors will somehow be compensated for their work. I don’t claim that this will happen in the same way that the book industry works now, nor am I assuming that everything will be produced in traditional formats. I assume that whatever system exists will differ somewhat by language and perhaps even by country.

I think that some kind of system like this is necessary, so that, in the future, local authors can write or produce their works and have those works find a Mormon audience — one that they can’t reach now because the LDS market is only in English and mostly inaccessible outside of the Intermountain West without an Internet connection.

So, ask yourself these questions:

* Does posting free ebooks to a website help or deter the development of some kind of system for distributing LDS products?

* Is it fair that the author may not be compensated fairly for works distributed for free – at least some minority of which could have been sold?

* If a local author writes or produces a work for the LDS audience, how will that work get distributed?

* Is it better for local members that some LDS cultural works be produced locally? Or should all of them be translated from English?

Perhaps my assumptions are wrong, and distributing works for free is the best way to go. But I’m not sure how that would work.

And given the questions above, I believe that free will actually cost quite a lot.

Author success stories are no exception. For Mormons, Stephanie Meyer is the most recent example. She is just like so many LDS authors — a suburban housewife with kids who writes in her spare time. I’m sure she has a Church calling, worries about how well her kids are doing in school and probably finds inspiration in the people she knows. In fact, her life is just like that of half the women in my ward.

The problem is Meyer’s success — or that of Orson Scott Card, Dean Hughes, Rachel Nunes or whoever — is really very difficult to replicate.

It comes down to sales. Authors usually earn royalties (in general from 5% to 15% of the cover price) on the number of copies sold. Normally that works out to anything from $0.50 to $2 or more a copy. Now to earn the median US income for a family of 4 (about $60,000 a year), an author’s books need to sell 40,000 to 120,000 copies, depending on price and royalties.

Of course, the average book published by a large New York publisher is fortunate to sell 5,000 copies during its life (not per year, like the number needed to make the median income). But for most books that life means large sales in the first few months, declining rapidly at first, and then slowly later in its life. Books that break that lifecycle, and see an increase in sales later in life, are often successes to some extent.

The same is true in the LDS market, but the quantities are smaller — 2,000 copies might be a good selling title. But the lifecycle is similar, if shorter.

All this means is that for an author to make a living at writing, successful strategies are few and
few between. Since sales naturally decline, authors must regularly write new books. The problem with surviving on royalties is that the number of books necessary is often more than most authors can write! Even after years of writing many books a year, most authors still don’t earn enough in royalties to really survive.

There are, of course, alternate strategies. Academic authors generally write more for improving their curricula vitarum, than for royalties, and they gain financially by gaining an academic position. Experts on a subject can write books to improve their reputations. The reputation then helps them get speaking engagements, consulting arrangements, and other money-earning opportunities.

There are other strategies, also. Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired magazine, talks about some of them in his article and forthcoming book, Free. [Although, I think the alternate strategies for fiction are weaker than those for non-fiction.]

In the end, authors who wish to earn a living from their writing should probably think carefully about the strategy they choose to use. Authors need to actually do the math and make sure the strategy used will actually work — that it can actually provide an income.

But, perhaps more importantly, authors should also decide whether or not (or to what extent) they are writing for financial reasons. There are other motivations for writing. [I hope to get to those reasons later.]