5 ms·

You sound like you have a good grasp on the economics of publishing; what do you think are the chances of publishers being cut out by tactics like Amazon's curr

You sound like you have a good grasp on the economics of publishing; what do you think are the chances of publishers being cut out by tactics like Amazon's current 70% royalty for authors selling books through them directly between 2.99 and 9.99?

electromagnetic 17y ago
Zero, unless Amazon implements advances. The time inherent in writing a book is immense, some best selling authors only manage 1 entire book inside 3 years, whilst some are rather prolific with multiple titles inside a year. You're never going to attract anyone's attention, even paying high royalties, if you can't pay them for their time in advance. The real issue is though that self-publishing means self-everything. Advertising, marketing, cover design, distribution; everything. You're turning a writer into a contractor, they either have to do everything themselves and take forever, or they have to sub-contract. As most writers are writers by choice it seems, quite frankly, moronic why anyone would think they'd want to be anything else. It took years for most authors to ever get published, so why would they ever accept a deal that meant they'd only spend 30% of their time doing what they wanted? They had that when they were doing a real job. This isn't even concerning the major fact that all the talent is in the publishing industry already. Authors aren't going to be able to release the brilliantly edited books that are well marketed, distributed in multiple countries and often in multiple languages, with artistically designed covers. Doing all of those to a professional degree is as lucky as shooting yourself in the head and having no brain damage whatsoever despite a visible hole through your brain; I believe walking on water is more frequently reported. Simply put a mass self-publishing route would inevitably end up with everything been done by the publishing industry, now retitled as the 'self-publishing' industry that takes an 85%-90% cut of your book sales. Only this way, you don't get an advance and you'll likely have to pay the 'self-publishing industry' thousands to get them to cover all the work in advance of any foreseen profits. Essentially authors have the choice between the publishing industry where you can get paid anywhere between ~$5,000 and $2 million to write a book. Or you can choose 'self-publishing' where you'll likely have to pay a minimum of ~$50,000 to get quality editing, distribution, cover art and most costly of all marketing. With $10,000 being an average advance in the industry for a first novel, who's going to pay $50,000 potentially for nothing? Especially considering that if you go with the industry, if your book doesn't sell a single copy they're out $90,000 plus the $10,000 they gave you and you are legally entitled to keep. Right now the publishing houses don't buy out the first electronic publishing rights from the author or the electronic republishing rights. It's only going to be a matter of time before they do, which means authors advances will increase accordingly. If the publishing industry takes on the similar 70/30 to the author, then the advances could potentially increase dramatically if e-book sales really take off. However, again, after editing and marketing, this would likely be closer to 30/70 to the author.
- etherael 17y ago
  What do you think would be the most tactically sound method of actually showing the price difference between dead tree format books and their eBook equivalents? It seems this is the clincher that appears to absolutely terrify the publishing industry, but if it can't be done it reduces the value proposition for eBooks substantially. Sure, there's still corner cases like it's much easier to store/carry/access/organise an eBook library than a paper book library, and delivery is intrinsically much faster, but I can't help thinking it's a huge fail on the part of the eBook market if they can't also push the massive production price per copy advantage they have. Oh, and as an addition to that, region locking availability of eBooks is extremely frustrating as a consumer, but I assume that this is something the publishers are also forcing on Amazon? I bought Programming the Universe yesterday via Amazon, it initially wasn't available from Australia, but as I'm moving to Tallinn in a couple of days I just changed my address on amazon a little ahead of time and it immediately became available. It's these kind of tactics that force the market to just circumvent legitimate channels entirely.
  - electromagnetic 17y ago
    As far as I've been able to ascertain the author gets royalties anywhere between 8% and 15% of the cover price of a book (hardback is near universally accepted at 15% and mass market paperbacks likely hit at 8%). 45%-55% is taken by the publisher, however this includes the authors royalties and the printing costs are ~10% of the cover price. So, assuming hardback royalties and printing costs the publisher could be taking less than 20% for editing, advertising and marketing. However, it can also easily be as high as ~37%. Now here's the very crucial part for ebooks. Distribution costs, from what I have found out, are on average 10% of cover price. A whopping 40% on average goes to the retailer. Less printing and distribution costs, a novel should still be selling for 80% of cover price when brand new (hardback equivalence). Macmillan likely isn't being greedy here, if people who read on eBooks want novels as soon as they hit the market, then they should by rights be expected to cover the costs. The problem with rigid pricing is that a $10 charge for brand new and 2 year old material is insane. I've picked up mass market paperbacks at $6 without a discount, but brand new novels genuinely cost $30 and beyond. Even if Amazon waived 3/4 of their cut, without distribution and publishing costs, (50% off basically) it should still be selling for between $15 and $20 for a brand new novel. An addendum to this is that all books are unique. The prices and costs vary, for example a cookbook is far more expensive to print than a simple paperback. Kindle, in my opinion, would hold great promise when a coloured e-ink is used(/usable) for selling graphic novels and comics on. They have far higher printing costs than anything else (minor editing of both writing and art), but already retail at reasonable prices (unless you're grabbing a Frank Miller A-3 sized bastard). Potentially it could take us back to comic books retailing at $1-$2 instead of like $10. With the mass potential for region locking and other DRM's I don't believe eBooks are currently a good thing, and they're certainly not a friend to any prolific reader. I hand some of my read books out left, right and center to anyone who wants it. I remember my mum taking entire grocery bags full of books to her work (in a hospital) where the staff used to swap books. Where's the potential for this in eBooks? With the Kindle being constantly connected to the internet, you would expect that a single eBook could be sent between Kindles without restriction quite easily. This would mean the only hurdle left for paper-like eBook usage would be the region locking, which again sounds like an exclusively Amazon made problem. I really don't see why a US publisher would care about region locking, electronic publication rights are handled as though the internet is one entity (so it isn't to enforce the authors rights to sell it in another country or anything), where as regular publication rights are exclusive to one territory (with the US and Canada being joint). I suppose there's potential in it to prevent it damaging paper book sales in foreign countries, however eBooks are currently tailing the market by many, many months so again, I have a hard time believing this is the publishing industries idea.

electromagnetic 17y ago

Zero, unless Amazon implements advances. The time inherent in writing a book is immense, some best selling authors only manage 1 entire book inside 3 years, whilst some are rather prolific with multiple titles inside a year. You're never going to attract anyone's attention, even paying high royalties, if you can't pay them for their time in advance. The real issue is though that self-publishing means self-everything. Advertising, marketing, cover design, distribution; everything. You're turning a writer into a contractor, they either have to do everything themselves and take forever, or they have to sub-contract. As most writers are writers by choice it seems, quite frankly, moronic why anyone would think they'd want to be anything else. It took years for most authors to ever get published, so why would they ever accept a deal that meant they'd only spend 30% of their time doing what they wanted? They had that when they were doing a real job. This isn't even concerning the major fact that all the talent is in the publishing industry already. Authors aren't going to be able to release the brilliantly edited books that are well marketed, distributed in multiple countries and often in multiple languages, with artistically designed covers. Doing all of those to a professional degree is as lucky as shooting yourself in the head and having no brain damage whatsoever despite a visible hole through your brain; I believe walking on water is more frequently reported. Simply put a mass self-publishing route would inevitably end up with everything been done by the publishing industry, now retitled as the 'self-publishing' industry that takes an 85%-90% cut of your book sales. Only this way, you don't get an advance and you'll likely have to pay the 'self-publishing industry' thousands to get them to cover all the work in advance of any foreseen profits. Essentially authors have the choice between the publishing industry where you can get paid anywhere between ~$5,000 and $2 million to write a book. Or you can choose 'self-publishing' where you'll likely have to pay a minimum of ~$50,000 to get quality editing, distribution, cover art and most costly of all marketing. With $10,000 being an average advance in the industry for a first novel, who's going to pay $50,000 potentially for nothing? Especially considering that if you go with the industry, if your book doesn't sell a single copy they're out $90,000 plus the $10,000 they gave you and you are legally entitled to keep. Right now the publishing houses don't buy out the first electronic publishing rights from the author or the electronic republishing rights. It's only going to be a matter of time before they do, which means authors advances will increase accordingly. If the publishing industry takes on the similar 70/30 to the author, then the advances could potentially increase dramatically if e-book sales really take off. However, again, after editing and marketing, this would likely be closer to 30/70 to the author.

etherael 17y ago
What do you think would be the most tactically sound method of actually showing the price difference between dead tree format books and their eBook equivalents? It seems this is the clincher that appears to absolutely terrify the publishing industry, but if it can't be done it reduces the value proposition for eBooks substantially. Sure, there's still corner cases like it's much easier to store/carry/access/organise an eBook library than a paper book library, and delivery is intrinsically much faster, but I can't help thinking it's a huge fail on the part of the eBook market if they can't also push the massive production price per copy advantage they have. Oh, and as an addition to that, region locking availability of eBooks is extremely frustrating as a consumer, but I assume that this is something the publishers are also forcing on Amazon? I bought Programming the Universe yesterday via Amazon, it initially wasn't available from Australia, but as I'm moving to Tallinn in a couple of days I just changed my address on amazon a little ahead of time and it immediately became available. It's these kind of tactics that force the market to just circumvent legitimate channels entirely.
- electromagnetic 17y ago
  As far as I've been able to ascertain the author gets royalties anywhere between 8% and 15% of the cover price of a book (hardback is near universally accepted at 15% and mass market paperbacks likely hit at 8%). 45%-55% is taken by the publisher, however this includes the authors royalties and the printing costs are ~10% of the cover price. So, assuming hardback royalties and printing costs the publisher could be taking less than 20% for editing, advertising and marketing. However, it can also easily be as high as ~37%. Now here's the very crucial part for ebooks. Distribution costs, from what I have found out, are on average 10% of cover price. A whopping 40% on average goes to the retailer. Less printing and distribution costs, a novel should still be selling for 80% of cover price when brand new (hardback equivalence). Macmillan likely isn't being greedy here, if people who read on eBooks want novels as soon as they hit the market, then they should by rights be expected to cover the costs. The problem with rigid pricing is that a $10 charge for brand new and 2 year old material is insane. I've picked up mass market paperbacks at $6 without a discount, but brand new novels genuinely cost $30 and beyond. Even if Amazon waived 3/4 of their cut, without distribution and publishing costs, (50% off basically) it should still be selling for between $15 and $20 for a brand new novel. An addendum to this is that all books are unique. The prices and costs vary, for example a cookbook is far more expensive to print than a simple paperback. Kindle, in my opinion, would hold great promise when a coloured e-ink is used(/usable) for selling graphic novels and comics on. They have far higher printing costs than anything else (minor editing of both writing and art), but already retail at reasonable prices (unless you're grabbing a Frank Miller A-3 sized bastard). Potentially it could take us back to comic books retailing at $1-$2 instead of like $10. With the mass potential for region locking and other DRM's I don't believe eBooks are currently a good thing, and they're certainly not a friend to any prolific reader. I hand some of my read books out left, right and center to anyone who wants it. I remember my mum taking entire grocery bags full of books to her work (in a hospital) where the staff used to swap books. Where's the potential for this in eBooks? With the Kindle being constantly connected to the internet, you would expect that a single eBook could be sent between Kindles without restriction quite easily. This would mean the only hurdle left for paper-like eBook usage would be the region locking, which again sounds like an exclusively Amazon made problem. I really don't see why a US publisher would care about region locking, electronic publication rights are handled as though the internet is one entity (so it isn't to enforce the authors rights to sell it in another country or anything), where as regular publication rights are exclusive to one territory (with the US and Canada being joint). I suppose there's potential in it to prevent it damaging paper book sales in foreign countries, however eBooks are currently tailing the market by many, many months so again, I have a hard time believing this is the publishing industries idea.