Sarah Hoyt explains why you should be darned careful not to base your business plans on wishful thinking:
Of course ebooks from traditional publishers are a) unreasonably priced (No, really. There is a book I’m dying to get. It’s $17 for ebook. It’s $32 for the hardcover. You know, I have KULL subscription and the indie books aren’t as good as this particular book should be, but it takes a lot of not as good at 9.99 a month to compare to those prices.) b) often stupidly formatted/edited c) even more often on themes/by authors I have no interest in. (Other than Baen, I currently read two other authors. Period. Oh, and one in mystery.)
Or to put it another way, traditional publishers went to war with Amazon to be allowed to price their books astronomically high. Amazon let them. They priced books at same price as hardcover or a little under (a very little.) E-book sales fell, compared to what they were when books were tops 9.99. Um….
Let me see if I can explain this as I would a child: your little friends love and adore your cupcakes. So you decide to set up shop and make a batch in your easy-bake oven, and sell them for ten cents a piece. Since your friends’ on average have an allowance of a dollar a week, you sell out of the whole batch in hours. So you think “Hey, I can make more.” You set the price at a dollar per cupcake. No one buys them. Your conclusion is “My friends no longer like cupcakes and prefer to eat vegetable sticks.”
Would anyone but a two year old buy that narrative? Well, according to publishers this is a perfectly sane thing to say. I mean, if people won’t buy your overpriced ebooks, it must mean they are going back to paper. Happy days are here again. Let’s build warehouses for all those books we’ll be shipping out to the no-longer existent big-chain bookstores! We’ll be able to control what books make it by our push again! We’re rich, rich, I tell you.
But it’s not just publishers. A friend sent me this article, and I scratched my head and frowned at it and said, in my deep thinking way, “Wut?” This is sort of like if you told your mom your friends’ refusal to buy your $1 a piece cupcakes was because they liked celery more and she said “Sounds legit. For your birthday party we’ll have ONLY celery.”
A. You bet.
B. Your choice of font makes my headache.
Comment by Steve Muhlberger — November 15, 2015 @ 07:54
Sorry for the font-induced headache, Steve. It is the default font selection from the original WordPress template I adapted (I messed around with colour and column options, but not the font. Have you tried increasing/decreasing the zoom to see if it improves for you? (In Firefox, that’s the <Ctrl>+/<Ctrl>- key combination, it’s probably similar in other browsers.)
Comment by Nicholas — November 15, 2015 @ 08:47
I love my e-reader, but I don’t like the way they changed the pricing model after I bought it, a few years back. I will not, ever, pay paperback prices for an electronic version of a book. I will, without shame, search the underweb for electronic versions of books I already own. I sometimes will justify it in my own mind, especially if an electronic version is available but costs an ungodly amount of money. I mean, it costs nothing to print, there is no shipping, no warehousing, nothing in costs but digital space; Pennies. And the publishers are trying to justify this? There are many sources of free books. And Amazon also provides a number of freebies and low priced books.
In the end I also blame Apple for their meddling in the process, but I am anti-Apple all the way anyway.
Comment by Dwayne — November 16, 2015 @ 01:06
I refuse to commit to eBooks, as I’m not comfortable that the “seller” can remove it from my reader without my knowledge or permission … that lack of control over property I’ve paid money for makes the whole eBook thing a scam in my view. I’ve got dozens of public domain books on my iPhone, but they’re spread over three or four different readers so I’m not sure exactly what I’ve got and where to find it. I consider them “emergency reading material” for those times when I don’t have a real book to read and I don’t have internet access.
Comment by Nicholas — November 18, 2015 @ 08:41