Got deeper into the weeds of pricing out PoD books, and looked at Backerkit costs. The latter, first: I’d have to do a couple hundred bucks’ worth of add-ons and so forth to make Backerkit worth it, at any level of funding. A lot easier to do if I’m just doing no-shipping items, but I’d likely be better off just… not.
As to PoD: I made an error in the spreadsheet, and when corrected it turns out that my profit on PoD books goes down to one-third the profit on each e-book, and if I raise it a buck it only hits one-half or so. That doesn’t bother me, but: why the hell aren’t the big publishing companies actively prioritizing e-sales over paperback ones? Unless I calculated something incorrectly, the reduced printing costs more than justifies a significant cut in sticker price, then you just keep selling e-books to that market until you need to buy another set of trousers*. Somebody’s missing a bet here.
Moe Lane
AFAICT, Baen is the only traditional publisher that actively promotes e-books. It’s been a source of consternation amongst authors for years (see Sarah Hoyt). Some charge significantly *more* for their ebooks.
Oh look, here she is today with with a “WTF Tradpub?” blog post.
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https://accordingtohoyt.com/2020/02/05/how-things-have-always-been/
The mainstream publishers primary function is to launder money and slurp up student loans[but I repeat myself]. I don’t think sensible business practices enter into it.
Author Sarah Hoyt talks about this sort of thing a lot on her blog. One of her frequent points is that the publishing houses are too hide-bound and too convinced that the e-books thing is merely a passing fad. A related point is that a lot of that view has to do with self-interest. If e-books are a passing thing, then the traditional publishing houses will maintain their hold on the market. If e-books aren’t a passing fad, then the publishing houses will go the way of the dinosaur. After all, anyone can go to Amazon and list their e-book on that website for free (which is what I did). Amazon only gets paid when the book sells copies (or people read it in KULL). As a result, it’s in trad publishing’s best interests to discourage people from embracing e-books.
Came here to make a similar comment–it seems to be widely suspected that they’re desperate to conserve their current revenue model, and (apparently) refuse to consider a new one.
Sunk-cost fallacy.
They’ve invested an awful lot of money and effort building supply chains, warehousing, and distribution.
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Not to mention that there’s a lot of cachet in being a gatekeeper, and in that role, you’d hate to see gates become obsolete.
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Plus there’s the fact that they’ve gotten lazy.
When we were young, they had to sell their product to individual stores across the land. And a great deal of that was to businesses that kept a couple spinner racks as a sideline.
But when the big chains formed, and then came to dominate, purchasing quickly became centralized at the company HA.
So, instead of having to market to the masses, they only had to market to a handful of buying agents. Ones that just so happened to be of the same class/regional socio-political bent. And the relationships, as such things tend to do, quickly became incestuous.
But what’s good debauchery without more participants? Since they no longer had to cast so wide a net to capture buyers, they also outsourced acquisitions to agent houses. Why pay someone to dig through the slush pile, when authors themselves will happily pay for the privilege of hiring a fixer. Since the agencies were staffed by the same clique, the agents knew what the editors knew the buyers would buy. And everyone partied and freely traded hats and other things.
Then Amazon gave everyone access to all the books–not just the ones the chains stocked.
Then e-books happened.
And Borders went bust.
And the federal government objected to price fixing.
So here they sit in a tattered and stained dress, wondering where the good time have gone.
I guess I should note the fraud, late payments, and exploitive contracts as well.
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Not to mention that advances for beginning and mid-list writers haven’t gone up in over 40 years, but small print runs, creative accounting, and limited distribution mean they still don’t generally earn out.
(As an aide, the launch of Larry Corriea’s “Son of the Black Sword” was a mayor release of a bestselling author with lots of push. The Barnes & Noble where I lived at the time didn’t get around to putting the books on the shelves until a week later. They had then. I made them go back and get me one. But you wouldn’t have known it if you didn’t already. I have heard moderately successful published authors complain that their local branchnever shelved their books. They just sat in back for a month, and were then returned.)
Well, that particular example could be down to antipathy to Correia, too, for not being the right kind of person.