Let's imagine this crime scene together, shall we...?
J.K. Rowling has announced that Harry Potter book 8 is to be released this Friday. Fans young and old are clamouring (and clambering) for what will be the publishing event of the year. On Friday, online sales begin at 9am...
But at 9:30am all copies of the book are sold out.
At 9:40am a site on the internet (let's call it eBay) starts selling copies at 5 times the cover price, at around the £100 mark. Most of the people who have ordered copies have ordered around eight so they can scalp people on the internet (the scalpers call it reselling). The fans don't get their copies, and the author doesn't get any of the profit. In other words, everyone but the scalpers loses out.
Sound familiar?
Thankfully, I work in an industry where this isn't a real problem - it has other problems, let's be honest about that, but doesn't suffer the scalping scourge that hits other parts of entertainment. And I don't think it suffers this because there isn't the opportunity to. I'm pretty certain if Harry Potter Book 8 is published, then there will be plenty of vultures trying to squeeze money out of fans and the author... It's just that fans who are readers aren't that stupid.
And let's face it, you'd have to be really stupid to buy a resell ticket for seven or eight times the value via those scalping sites such as Viagogo.
Unfortunately, there are people who are that stupid, which is why I and other writers are still in jobs, because we make money out of stupid people too (just as we make money out of the vultures we write about). We don't exploit them, no. We just write about them.
Do you want to know what's better than reading about yourself in a novel because you are one of those people?
I'll tell ya, it's not being one of those stupid people. It's not being a vulture either.
It would make me, and other authors I think, happier if it wasn't that easy to write about stupid people, so please don't be one of them. Avoid the scourge of scalpers that society would be better off without. Avoid the businesses that lets them thrive (Live Nation, that means you), and for the artists who are allowing this exploitation, please treat your fans with more respect. Sure, some might be stupid, but they're loyally so.
Fans are an artist's lifeblood. And what are you without them?
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