Quote:
Originally Posted by MrPLD
I admire those people who sell their eBooks for $0.99 each, I can only imagine they've done it on the side and are releasing it more as a novelty rather than anything else.
|
J.A. Konrath was making his mortgage payments and then some on $1.99 ebooks; he's bumped most of them to $2.99 to take advantage of Amazon's 70% author percentage, and is *raking* in money.
The issue isn't, how much per book do you think you deserve? What you *deserve* is irrelevant. The monetary value of your writing is based on what people are willing to pay for it, not on how much effort you put into it.
The issue is, can you sell 1000 books at $3 ($2.10-for-you; $2100 total) faster than you can sell 429 books at $7 ($4.90-for-you; $2100+ total)? If you're considering going through a publisher, it's, can you sell 1000 books at $3 on your own faster than they can sell 1200 at $7, of which you get 25% instead of 70%?
I will buy a $2 or $3 non-DRM'd novel on a whim, based on a blurb I like, regardless of genre, by an author I've never heard of before. A $7 book? Forget it. I've got a backlist of Baen titles by authors I love that I haven't scrounged up money for. I will *occasionally* take advantage of a sale to buy a novel marked down to $4--but not often.
Paid ebooks are competing with blogs and fanfic for my reading time. The amount of "entertaining material to read" I have access to is *huge.* Since I'm generally told I can't hand off ebooks to a friend -- unlike blogs & fanfic, where I can say, "I loved this! You go read it too!" -- my interest in them is more solitary, more selfish; I'm not willing to spend much on pleasures I can't share.
---
The traditional publishing model is, for the most part, doing well. (Sort of. It's dying, but slowly. It will continue to limp along for quite a while.) However, it doesn't transfer to ebooks; the support systems that allow paper publishing to work don't exist. There are no used ebook stores selling the first three books in a series at bargain prices so someone can decide to buy the new one when it comes out next month. There are no ebook clubs reading new, used, and shared copies of the same novel and discussing them once a week. There are no collectible editions. And now a large cluster of publishers have removed one of the few features it did have: the ability of the store to sell bundled sets at a discount.
PBook profits work as they do because of a *huge* industry supporting their sales. Ebooks don't have the same kind of support, the same kind of buyer options. People are expected to buy them as throwaway items: read and delete; don't expect it to survive your next OS upgrade; don't expect to share it with anyone who doesn't share an address with you.
Some will buy under those terms anyway, but not everyone who'll buy a new pbook will spend the same money on a book they can't give away if they don't care to re-read it.