I am interviewed by Paula B of 'The Writing Show'

[ficbot]

Paula B got into the comment fray following the discussion at Teleread of the articles from myself and others on the MacMillan/Amazon fiasco and other ebook-y things. She invited me to appear on her show and I accepted. She says it's a great interview---I never liked listening to myself on tape so I didn't listen---but I know we certainly had a spirited conversation Link

[dreams]

You did pretty good on the interview expressing your ideas.
.. have you thought of a marketing career? Lots of good ideas. It's too bad many companies are part of business groups and ideas and spending for marketing have to be approved by the Board and all the little boards and stockholders on the way down.. Which translates to.. what? You mean we won't earn as much for this projected quarter? Forget it, just raise the price, it's not our problem the market is down. Projected sales volume down, but revenue the same... bah. (and, yeah, guilty of having a couple of relatives on Board of Directors protecting their earnings.)

[cbarnett]

Thanks for the link, downloading now!

[charleski]

You should be in politics.

You write a post which is rant about readers not wanting to pay $15 for a book, but by the time you get interviewed, the issue has morphed into editing mistakes in ebooks.
Teleread: "readers at Mobileread are organizing initiatives such as a boycott on all $15 books, and an interesting campaign to catch author and agent attention by deluging offending books with 1-star reviews."
The Writing Show: "The genesis behind that post was essentially a post that was made at mobileread where several readers who were unhappy with editing mistakes in the ebooks they were buying instituted a campaign [...] where they left 1-star reviews for books that had been downloaded by them and had these problems."
Were you hoping people wouldn't notice?

AFAICR the 1-star review campaign started over publishers wanting to window their releases, and then predictably diverted to the whole pricing issue. Let's search through the threads to see if the word 'editing' appears:
Kindle users give 1 star rating to book with delayed ebook release Nope, nothing relevant there
The $15 Boycott: Will you be participating? 1 post explaining that Baen eARCs are uncorrected proofs.

Way to go with putting on the spin in your opening paragraph! Instead of it being about readers who want to pay as little as possible for their books, it becomes an issue about publishers not devoting enough attention to ebook creation.

I'd certainly like to see publishers devote the same care to producing ebooks that they do for physical product. I'd certainly like to see them give ebooks the importance they deserve as part of their release schedule. I'd certainly like to see DRM die a miserable death. But this isn't a 'community', this is a market, and good books come at a price.

We need to keep putting pressure on publishers to get their ebook strategies sorted out. But everyone who reads this forum knows very well that all the fuss that was made at the start of February was about one thing - price. And all it managed to do was justify everything that publishers had been saying over the past year about the way ebooks (and the Kindle in particular) had been degrading the perceived value of books. Any publisher who's frightened by the way ebooks will change the market will just look at that and see their fears confirmed.

[ficbot]

I disagree that it was just about price---I think a lot of people would be willing to pay the higher ebook price IF they felt that publishers were going to play fair about it both and offer a product *worth* the 'same' amount, and really follow through on lowering it with the 'windowing' they claim will happen. I don't think there was any 'spin' going on---I was asked my opinion about what was going on, and I gave *my opinion*

[Billjr13]

Nice job Ficbot, I thought your sounded fine and were well spoken and easy to understand. K to you Ma'am.

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by charleski

You should be in politics.
Way to go with putting on the spin in your opening paragraph! Instead of it being about readers who want to pay as little as possible for their books, it becomes an issue about publishers not devoting enough attention to ebook creation.

I'd certainly like to see publishers devote the same care to producing ebooks that they do for physical product. I'd certainly like to see them give ebooks the importance they deserve as part of their release schedule. I'd certainly like to see DRM die a miserable death. But this isn't a 'community', this is a market, and good books come at a price.

Have you heard of gold-plating? That's what incumbent industries who are certain they will still be able to sell their product in the future do (esp. problematic in the health-care industry, where they noticed that they could just "sell" all their patients a mandatory TV subscription during their stay, which allowed them to tack 50$ on to the hospital bill).
Remember: we're not talking about a competitive industry here. The only thing they need to be good at is marketing, everything else is unimportant so long as a book doesn't contain more than 1 grievous error per page.
Why are you so quick to assume that they're already being their most efficient selves? The movie (and music) industry literally never makes a profit, because they make sure that all their profits are eaten up by their daughter companies who are headquartered abroad.. Is it really so unlikely to think that something similar is also happening in publishing?