Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I understand why getting them at that price is a good deal for you. I don't understand what makes it good for the author or the publisher.
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I assume that the author and the publisher will consider something better than nothing.
As a record company exec once said, How do you compete with free?
If a backlist fiction title is currently unavailable as a legitimate eBook, the publisher and the author are getting nothing from eBook sales.
Elfwreck today in another thread described how easy it is to make an eBook copy. So the pirate copy of this backlist item either exists or could easily exist tomorrow.
A sales pitch could be made that the "official" eBook is a better product than the pirate version, and well worth the 99 cents.
But the public isn't going to want to hear a story about how expensive it is to create an eBook. Not when they know that the pirates are doing it for nothing.
By the way, when I brought up the concept of backlist items, I had in mind items like Perry Mason whose authors are long dead. I can understand a living author wanting more than 20 cents for his work, but I assume that if the market were there for real money, the "official" eBook would already exist, and he'd already be making the real money. Presumably, the time for making the big bucks on that work of art has passed, and we are now looking at the "found money" stage of the process.