Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
The day I receive an author's manuscript in ASCII will be the first day in the 25 years I have been in publishing that such an event will have occurred. Authors usually submit their manuscripts in a MS Word document that is riddled with styles and formatting -- usually haphazardly done. At least for the books on which I work, cleanup takes a lot of time. Then the manuscript has to be edited and recoded to conform to the codes needed to produce the final version of the book.
I'll admit I do not work on novels and there may be less involved -- or not -- with that genre, but the nonfiction books I work on take several weeks worth of work to prepare a manuscript for publication. The process is not as cut and dried as some would make it to be.
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Turning a book manuscript file--even a clean one--into an ebook is a time-intensive process, far more than most people on this forum seem to realize. It's definitely not "a few seconds" as someone earlier said. The manuscript-file prep alone can takes days, starting with someone making sure all the final editing changes are in. This process could be shortened if typesetting files were designed to optimize the process, but they're not.
If you'd like a taste of what's involved, read the threads on my creation of free ebooks of The Infinite Sea, Sunborn, and others.
As someone said before, the costs of editorial, art, marketing, sales and promotion, and a lot more are costs that will apply to any book, tree or e.
I'd like to see less expensive ebooks, too, but the notion that ebooks are a trivial expense to produce and sell is very much a myth.