Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
No dodging is necessary. Baen's model works for Baen. It will not work for most other publishers, especially the big ones.
For reasons why, see Kris Rusch's blog posts on the topic. ...
See http://kriswrites.com/2010/10/28/the...-times-part-2/ and following columns. |
Good columns; good info... they explain why big publishing hasn't used Baen's model; they don't explain why Baen's methods can't work for them.
Can't work as well as their current 90% cut with the several stages between author and reader, sure. But their current system is
falling apart--they've gutted it themselves for ebooks by demanding the agency model, insisting that they want to sell directly instead of hiring someone to manage marketing to the customers. The new book market is panicking in competition with Amazon's used book listings; turns out a lot of people will buy a $5-with-shipping book instead of the $14 TPB or the $25 hardcover.
Baen's method is not "give away free ebooks and sell new ones at $6." It's more abstract than that.
Know your market.
Find out what they're willing to pay.
Sell to them at that price.
As long as that allows for *any* profit, it's a successful business model.
The big publishers are flailing because for a long time, that hasn't been their business model. They've been deciding what books will be popular, and promoting those extensively, and selling others as smaller runs/paperback only; they set the price based on what they want to make, on the theory that the market will have to pay whatever price they set; they sell to
distributors who sell to
stores who sell to readers, so they've got no direct influence on or feedback from the people who, ultimately, are buying their products.
They've got several more years of being able to decide what the bestsellers are--the literature community moves a lot slower than the music communities, and they've got a lot of inertia built up. But they're going to watch the industry schism into a thousand POD and ebook publishers who *are* willing to find out what people want to read and provide it to them.