Kobo Writing Life Podcast – Episode 002 with Robert Levine

[audio http://traffic.libsyn.com/kobowritinglife/kwl_002_robert_levine.mp3]

Kobo Writing Life Director Mark Lefebvre interviews author Robert Levine, the author of Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back.

Mark and Robert discuss the following:

• The vision of the orderly process of interviewing subjects for a non-fiction book VS the actuality
• The hard part being stopping (research and interviews) when you feel that you have enough material
• Understanding copyright law when you’re not an attorney
• The stress of publishing deadlines even with a supportive editor behind you
• What it’s like traveling the globe for research and delivering the finished product
• The difference between writing for dailies/weeklies/monthlies and writing a book which relies more on the underlying ideas than current events & details
• The essence of what publishers do in terms of aggregating risk
• The concept of making it convenient to do the right thing and inconvenient to do the wrong thing
• The inconclusive nature of the way different generations respond to the concept of copyright, digital and free media
• The economics of windowing with respect to format releases in publishing
• The difference in cost between making Iron Man 2 and the book Free Ride
• Pricing books and eBooks to maximize revenue

This episode also includes Q&A regarding the right price to set for your eBook as well as an overview of one author’s experiment with increasing the price of her eBook on the various eBook retail platforms.

Robert Levine’s book Free Ride on Kobo (Please note there are two different links depending on which territory you’re in):

Free Ride: CA, US, HK, SG, ID, JP, BR

Free Ride: GB, AU, NZ, DE, FR, ES, NL, IT, HK, SG, AT, CH, ID, JP, PT, ZA, BR

Robert Levine’s Website