[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

But Amazon must have known it was just a strategy. It makes no sense to capitulate. If a buyer looks for a book and doesn't find it in ebook form, he is left with 4 options: buy another ebook, wait for the ebook, buy the pbook or look for the ebook at a different store. If it gets out that the reason that the book wasn't there is because the publishers want to increase the prices, Amazon still wins.

Amazon is a retailer. They sell other people's products. The people whose products they sell do not have to sell to Amazon (though you better be a really big player to do without Amazon sales.) The Agency Model folks cut off ebook sales to Amazon, and they were five of the six largest publishers. If Amazon wants to be the dominant force in ebook retailing (and they do), it's a little hard to do that when most of the ebooks you might want to offer are not available to you.

So it's a game of chicken. Amazon may know it's a strategy. They won't know how long the Agency Model folks are willing to withhold product from them. But since the Agency Model folks are still primarily selling print editions, Amazon is still selling those, and ebooks aren't yet critical to their success, they might just be willing to hold back product a long time.

If I'm Amazon, I'll probably do what they did: accept the demands to charge higher prices, sell the books to folks who want to buy them, and point at the publishers as the villains.

The truth, as usual, is muddier. Amazon wants to extend its dominance in retail through pricing, and has been pushing hard for even greater discounts from publishers, to give them more margin to play with in discounting. The squabble over ebook pricing is a facet of a larger tug-of-war.

No, I didn't miss it, but the advance is on the royalties. At the end of the day, in the case of pbooks, the author has an advance *or* royalties (depending on what is higher, and from what I understand, for most authors it is the advance that is higher). And as you said, the publisher estimates how many books will be sold, and gives the advance accordingly. This means that usually the advance will be in the range of the royalties, unless the book becomes a bestseller.

But the fact remains that with these ebooks the royalties are higher, and therefore the costs are higher.

Only for books that actually sell.

For print books, the publisher offers an advance against royalties. They give the author a chunk of the anticipated royalties up front to acquire the right to publish the title, expecting to recover it once the book is issued and selling. The hope is the book will "earn out" - sell enough copies to cover costs, make money, and generate additional royalties paid to the author in quarterly statements. Most books don't earn out. The advance is all the author sees. (And agents try to negotiate an advance high enough that the book won't earn out.)

If the publisher errs badly enough in estimating demand for the book, a hefty advance can be a large component in a nasty loss on the title.

Publishing a book is always a risk. The publisher is betting that the book will sell, and the size of the bet they place is determined by the sales potential they see. Sometimes they lose, and the book doesn't sell. They are out most of the costs of producing it, with the advance a large component of the loss.

If a Carina title doesn't sell, they are out the editorial and production costs (which they try to keep as low as possible.) They are not out the advance, because they don't pay advances. If the book does sell, they must pay royalties, but those royalties will be on copies sold. They'll be crying all the way to the bank.

It's a numbers game, and "many" are not "most". It would go like this: from the total number of romance market, you take the percentage of those with ereaders (and I didn't say eInk) and multiply by the percentage of those who know about Carina Press and you wouldn't get a very big number.

You wouldn't? How do you know?

Harlequin is the behemoth in romance publishing. You may not care for what they publish, but they are very good at what they do. Aside from the "cookie cutter" Harlequin Romance titles people love to sneer at, they've been diversifying into genre crossovers, like the Luna fantasy romance line (where the fantasy is the dominant element, and the romance is a sub-plot), or the Silhouette suspense/romance line. (Some of the Luna titles are quite good.)

They are also very aware of ebooks, and have an existing ebook program. (They just announced that going forward, all titles would be issued in ePub format, and they were dropping support for MobiPocket, MSReader, and PDF editions.)

Part of the requirements when they decided to do the Carina line was that it would be profitable "out of the box".

So you can assume they did their homework, and see a big enough market to make Carina a successful venture. I'll take their guess over yours or mine about how big the potential market is.

Considering the fact that many that hear about this will also hear that the quality isn't very good, or maybe even buy a book that isn't very good, and the number becomes smaller.

Maybe. The quality in any slush pile is generally poor, but readable books come from somewhere. You can assume books published electronically by Carina may not be up to the rest of Harlequin's offerings, but that won't make them "bad". Carina won't survive publishing bad books. If they publish books that sell well enough to make it worth doing, and a few of those titles go on to bigger and better things, like print editions with Harlequin, it's gravy.

They've been in operation for months now and the plug hasn't been pulled, so I have to assume they are meeting projections.

I think the despairing noises about quality from the friend who was editing for them are reflections of the fact that she'd been executive editor of an imprint before going freelance, and hadn't had to read slush in years. She paid other people to do that and forward the stuff worth a look. Reading slush is soul destroying.

And the system that I was suggesting was for all the books to get the same treatment. Actually only the first chapter, so the author wouldn't gave to work on the whole book before he finds out if it is worth it or not. It would clear out the problem of market research and marketing, and maybe even the medium. If all the people who want the book prefer paper we get a pbook, if they prefer digital, we get an ebook.

I see the concept, and it's an interesting idea. The question is how many folks will spends the time reading first chapters and voting? I'm not one of them. I have other uses for the time, and the first chapter may not be a good indicator for the rest of the book. (More than a few titles out there that take a bit to kick in but are superb once they have, which would fare poorly under such a scheme.)

If I walk in a bookstore and all I see are vampire books and other books that I already bought, then I'll probably walk out with a vampire book.

You would have to be desperate for stuff to read. And if all you see are vampire books and books you already bought, you buy an awful lot of books, or have a very small local bookstore, or both.

Granted, my experience skews the other way: the bookstores close to me are large, with a broad selection, thank you, so there will be far more than just vampire novels and stuff I already have. And if by some chance vampire books and stuff I already have is all that's available, I'll walk out with nothing. I'm not that desperate. I have too many existing titles worthy of a re-read.

Sure I could boycott the system, but it would hurt me more than it hurts them, plus this will be over eventually, and then we will get an overdose of the new whatever.

Exactly. I am a little curious about what that will be. At the moment, I call zombies the new vampires, given the popularity of things zombie. I'm comforted by the fact that a generation of teenage girls isn't likely to suffer huge amounts of angst over a potential zombie boyfriend, and we'll be spared a variant of Twilight with zombies as romantic leads. What we might get instead is another matter. (Someone elsewhere described Twilight as "A teenage girl's hard choice: necrophilia or bestiality" I'm a little scared about how the Next Big Thing might be summarized.)

Read that post again. By the dictionary definition, you can't say that Amazon was extorting the publishers because Amazon is the one giving money to the publishers.

Extortion defines as obtaining money, property, or services through coercion.

If you are a producer, I sell your goods, and I try to use my position as a dominant seller to extract terms more favorable to me from you, that might well be called "extortion". (Whether is is is a matter of viewpoint. If I'm a retailer, I don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by getting terms from you that mean you don't make money on sales to me. It's possible that's the sort of terms Amazon was trying to get.)

BTW, I don't buy anything from Amazon, because I just don't like their website, but I disagree with the publishers increasing prices because they have a pissing match with Amazon.

The publishers aren't increasing prices because they have a pissing match with Amazon. They have a pissing match with Amazon because they wanted higher prices.
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Dennis