{"id":33581,"date":"2015-11-15T03:00:52","date_gmt":"2015-11-15T08:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33581"},"modified":"2015-11-12T10:59:00","modified_gmt":"2015-11-12T15:59:00","slug":"the-more-likely-explanation-for-the-fall-in-ebook-sales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/11\/15\/the-more-likely-explanation-for-the-fall-in-ebook-sales\/","title":{"rendered":"The more likely explanation for the fall in eBook sales"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sarah Hoyt<\/a> explains why you should be darned careful not to base your business plans on wishful thinking:<\/p>\n

Of course ebooks from traditional publishers are a) unreasonably priced (No, really. There is a book I\u2019m dying to get. It\u2019s $17 for ebook. It\u2019s $32 for the hardcover. You know, I have KULL subscription and the indie books aren\u2019t 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.)<\/p>\n

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\u2026.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 on average have an allowance of a dollar a week, you sell out of the whole batch in hours. So you think \u201cHey, I can make more.\u201d You set the price at a dollar per cupcake. No one buys them. Your conclusion is \u201cMy friends no longer like cupcakes and prefer to eat vegetable sticks.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t buy your overpriced ebooks, it must mean they are going back to paper. Happy days are here again. Let\u2019s build warehouses for all those books we\u2019ll be shipping out to the no-longer existent big-chain bookstores! We\u2019ll be able to control what books make it by our push again! We\u2019re rich, rich, I tell you.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s 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, \u201cWut?\u201d This is sort of like if you told your mom your friends\u2019 refusal to buy your $1 a piece cupcakes was because they liked celery more and she said \u201cSounds legit. For your birthday party we\u2019ll have ONLY celery.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019m dying to get. It\u2019s $17 for ebook. It\u2019s $32 for the hardcover. You know, I have KULL subscription and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,831],"tags":[833,428,1026,85],"class_list":["post-33581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-business","tag-amazon","tag-marketing","tag-microeconomics","tag-sf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8JD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33582,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33581\/revisions\/33582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}