Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
No, dude. Just, no.
My point is that you have to pay people to do this kind of work, and there are all sorts of costs that people don't even think about.
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What no? You said that it costs 10k to convert. I say it doesn't, proof: the people who upload illegal books. There are costs, but if they go higher that $50 nobody would do it. All other costs that you mention don't actually go into making the conversion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
That's your argument? Seriously? No one on the web has mentioned it, therefore those costs don't exist? 
You're going to need lawyers to revise the highly individualized contracts and to help in the negotiations. And no, lawyers are not cheap, even when they're on staff. |
Well, you tend to mention advances and royalties as two separate costs when you talk about what makes the price of a book so I guess that you of all people would have mentioned anything that is remotely significant. The costs of the lawyers will be divided to all the books that are sold.
Publishers won't actually say how many books they sell, but according to
this in 2009 there were $13.483 billion worth of books sold in North America.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Uh, no.
Enslaving interns is not a viable business model. You either need to hire people or contract it out. Publishing is a for-profit enterprise, and people do not line up outside the door to offer to do grunt work for free.
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So publishers don't have interns? Ever?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Uh, no.
There is no "automatic" here. You need servers, database software, DB admins, programmers and backups.
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Do you remember saying this:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Ebooks are tiny -- typically 1mb or less. An ebook will cost you $0.000062 to back up to an external hard drive and takes virtually no time. Backing up your files is virtually free.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
You need to integrate the sales data from numerous retailers. You have to train people how to use it -- including your accountants, upper management, marketing and pretty much everyone in the company who needs to see sales data.
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Actually you just need to know at the end of the month how many books each retailer sold, and see the number match the money flow to the account. The sales data will be a simple table ebook/retailer/price/profit.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Not really. This is not a manufacturing process where you can leverage economies of scale. This is all human labor, and it isn't cheaper to hire 2 people than it is to hire 1.
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If it is really how you say, than the higher costs come from incompetence. I don't know if you ever used OCR software, but it can work connected directly to the scanner, so you get the result pretty fast. It also works very well with images, tables, special characters. Of course the publishers could give the task to a dinosaur that needs help reading an email.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
And to be clear, I'm not saying that the costs are so insufferably great and offer an insurmountable obstacle. I'm simply pointing out that it is not free, that the costs are higher than the average person presumes, and that converting a backlist title into an ebook incurs costs that need to be earned back.
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What you said is that is costs 10k. It doesn't.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Normally, the author gets 20-25% of the cover price, no matter how much the retailer charges for it.
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Can you give a quote for that?
Because according to
this article from 2009:
Quote:
Standard royalties for new books are as follows: 10% for hardcover, 7% (or sometimes 7.5%) for trade paperback, and 5% for mass market. Often, publishers will agree to incentive escalators (usually only on hardcovers). Here's a very typical hardcover example:
10% on the first 5,000 copies sold
12.5% on the next 5,000 copies sold
15% thereafter
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