03-12-2012, 07:33 AM | #31 |
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I come at this from two angles. First, as a consumer of indie books, and second, as a professional editor (of medical textbooks, not fiction).
As a consumer, I have become accustomed to the publishing houses, like Random House, being gatekeepers. Although I still see dreck from these publishers, it is not the worst of the dreck, which is available in the self-publishing market. In the not-so-long-ago-days of publishing, buying a book published by a Randomn House meant that it was edited and there were few grammar, spelling, and typographical errors -- not that it was error free, just that most errors were weeded out. Consequently, I was willing to pay $25 for a hardcover book (and am still willing to do do so). Then came ebooks to the consuming masses and I joined the crowd. My first discovery was that an ebook from a Random House was absolutely no guarantee of editorial quality, especially if the ebook version was a scan of the pbook. Consequently, I was (and am) no longer willing to pay a high price for an ebook. My second discovery was the world of self-publishing among indie authors. In the beginning, I was willing to spend $4.99 and even more for an ebook -- until I discovered that editorial quality was sorely lacking. If the Random House ebooks are riddled with errors, they often appear to be error-free compared to the self-published ebooks. And, unfortunately, there is no really good way to determine in advance of reading the indie book how well written and carefully edited it is. My experience has now made me limit how much I will pay for an indie book from an author I have never read before. Occasionally, if someone I truest recommends a book, I will pay $2.99 for an indie ebook, but generally, I will not pay more than 99 cents. Once I have discovered a good indie author whose books are well written and edited, I am willing to pay more for subsequent ebooks by that author, but not for my initial introduction to the author. |
03-12-2012, 07:41 AM | #32 |
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03-12-2012, 07:50 AM | #33 |
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Richard, I accept what you are saying and it is a valid point. My question is: if the bar hadn't been set at 99 cents, but at $2.99, would you still buy from an unpublished author? I would suspect that if everyone was charging the same starter price, you would have to.
Mr. Ploppy, you seem to be saying that the divide between published and unpublished authors is not as wide as one would suspect. Last edited by Justin Nemo; 03-12-2012 at 07:52 AM. |
03-12-2012, 08:00 AM | #34 |
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Errors are common in "back catalogue" stuff, but I very rarely see egrarious errors in new books. I believe you are mistaken in saying that traditional publishers do not employ proof-readers.
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03-12-2012, 08:14 AM | #35 | |
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I think the main problem with a lot of indie writers is they rush into it, sometimes even putting up a first draft. I tend to do that myself on my blog, just to test reaction, so I can understand why they would do that. But maybe if we all waited a year to publish, like the big boys do, the average quality would improve to a level that would justify a higher asking price? |
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03-12-2012, 08:19 AM | #36 |
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None of the big publisher books I have bought in the last 5 years or so have been error free, that's in both hardback and paperback. I don't buy their ebooks because they are often priced higher than the real ones, but I doubt those are any different.
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03-12-2012, 08:53 AM | #37 |
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As a reader there is no price that will make me buy your book, there is only a price that will stop me buying it. And that price is quite high. I'll easily pay £5 for a book that I believe is going to be a good read and double that or more for a favourite author or book I really want for some other reason.
But 99p or 99c or free by itself isn't going to get me to buy your book unless I've already got some other reason to be interested, and if I have that then you're doing yourself out of £3-£4 you could have had off me. My TBR list is too long (only ~190 but that's still 2-3years worth of reading for me) and life too short to bother with badly formatted, badly edited and badly written books. And statistically, thanks to Sturgeon's law, that's what it's likely to be. So I need a recommendation from someone I trust, a track record, some kind of inkling that it not only won't be bad but that it'll be to my taste. I don't know what the answer to that is if you're an author trying to sell your work (other than write as well as you possibly can) - I do know that it's not price. At least for me and of course I'm just one reader and may not be representative at all. |
03-12-2012, 11:07 AM | #38 |
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I have primarily republished existing books but I am just starting to get some of my own fiction out there as well. My lowest eBook price is $2.99 (my print equivalent is $8.95). Most of my eBooks are $4.99. I do have two eBooks that have higher prices due to their intended audiences. One is a teachers' guide to bully prevention for $9.99 (print is $19.99) and the other is a book that includes the full book text, the full screenplay text, and links back and forth all the common dialogue for $6.99 (print is $14.95).
My opinion is that $.99 is communicating one of two things to readers: 1. You are an established author that has already made a fortune and are giving something to your fans in appreciation. 2. You are a new or desperate writer in need of reviews and a better sales rank. I personally find the concept of a $.99 book absurd. That would be akin to a whole $9.95 music CD selling for $.99 just because it's in digital format. What that indirectly says to me, and incorrectly communicates to the consumers, is that 90% of the cost of any creative work is due to the medium that work is delivered in. This sets a bad precedent and has the potential of propagating in the minds of consumers, ultimately resulting in a general belief that digital content has little to no value simply because it is not tied to a physical medium. $.99 books are also just another example of writers, primarily independent ones, getting screwed. It's like Amazon's handy "delivery cost" for eBooks. Penguin gets away with charging $14.99 for crap books from their dusty catalog that they OCR'ed and didn't even pay an intern to spell check. Is Penguin paying Amazon's "delivery cost?" I don't think so. Amazon wants quality material and yet their $.99 / "free" book mindset, and a delivery cost tied to something as arbitrary as file size, is directly counterproductive. They want to show off the high-resolution color on the Kindle Fire but then force independent publishers to decrease the quality of their content, and increase the price of their books, to avoid losing 50% of their royalty to a stupid fee? And to add insult to injury, Amazon's conversion tools double the file size of image-heavy eBooks, meaning that I have to pay double the "delivery cost" for the privilege of selling on Amazon. And due to their convenient "don't sell cheaper elsewhere" mumbo jumbo, I can't decrease the price of my book when selling through channels that don't charge an obscene fee or use a stupid, bloated file format. This means that every non-Amazon customer has to eat Amazon's unnecessarily inflated price as well. Anyway, that's strayed off topic a bit. God it must be nice to have a monopoly and be able to blatantly abuse and take advantage of content creators and customers. To sum up: 1. What most writers create is inherently worth more than $.99. 2. The priorities are reversed in that new writers who have made no money charge $.99 whereas big publishers digitize previously-published books, that have already made loads of money, and gouge consumers for them--sometimes charging more for the eBook than a brand new paperback. Blegh. I'm sick of watching uncreative corporate fat-cats milking everyone just because they can. I hope the resounding finger the independent software/game creators are flipping at companies like Microsoft and EA bleeds over to the poor abused writers of the world as well. |
03-12-2012, 11:19 AM | #39 | |
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That was until I saw incomprehensible errors on nearly every page of that eBook. The best one was squirrel being spelled as "sqv1m3l." And no, I'm not exaggerating. That sent me googling to figure out why the quality was so bad. I learned that all the big publishing houses have no digital copies of their own material--even a lot of stuff that was digital at some point. So they essentially have an intern sitting there running OCR on a paperback and posting it directly for sale. Makes me sick. And I paid $14.99 for that garbage. And I'm sure that book had already made the publisher gobs of money when it was new and out in print as well. The errors in old content from big publishers are OCR-related. The errors from new writers are due to a lack of proofreading. |
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03-12-2012, 12:33 PM | #40 | |
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The example you quote is unusually bad. You generally at least get OCR + spell check. That can mean you end up with the wrong word (eg "be" instead of "he", or "clock" instead of "dock") but you do at least normally get recognisable words. Last edited by HarryT; 03-12-2012 at 12:46 PM. |
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03-12-2012, 12:55 PM | #41 | |
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Really agree with Harry and some of the other commenters - you can take away the printers, the agents, the executives and the other extraneous parts of the publishing process, but you need editors as much as you need writers, and I think good editors are going to get a bit of a name for themselves as their worth becomes more apparent. |
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03-12-2012, 01:17 PM | #42 | |
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Not being addressed is what actually is an error. For example, is using "since" when you mean "because" an error? Maybe, maybe not in today's usage. As for whether a proofreader or an editor is required, I think you need to define exactly what functions you expect each to perform. In the U.S., a proofreader does not correct grammar. They may question something, but they do not correct it; that is an editor's job. |
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03-12-2012, 04:24 PM | #43 | |
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03-12-2012, 04:37 PM | #44 | |
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I added a few things that incorporated those items and ran down the field with them. (That is the kind of thing that any person that writes does.) I used "$25.00" only because I wished to indicate a significant work by a significant author. The important things that a beginning author or for that matter any "under appreciated" author should be interested in besides expanding their own experience and skill, is exposure, name recognition, and an idea of how others see his or her work. To get those things they need to entice readers, publishers, and reviewers into noticing their writing, their stories, and their books. I remember one day walking into the news stand (old fashioned kind that has largely disappeared these days) and seeing a small display at the counter. "Free book." I went on by, perused the magazines, the new paper backs, and came back to the counter. "What's this?" "Free book. They are trying to promote this writer." I got it. It was a fair sized paperback, and then later I realized that it was still only about half the first volume of the "Wheel of Time" series. Of course if you are familiar with Fantasy and Sci-Fi, you know the name. Now my comment to you is this. "If Robert [f***ing] Jordan and his publisher can give away his book, who the heck do you think you are to have a fit about a 99 cent price on a digital copy. Get real man. You gotta do what you gotta do! |
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03-12-2012, 05:22 PM | #45 |
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Frahse, man you really need to get out more. We've moved on. Selling 100,000 copies of your book has gone to your head.
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