Quote:
Originally Posted by lilac_jive
There's more to agency pricing than that. The publisher sets the pricing in the Agency model, Smashwords is the distributor. Agency pricing also has the book price "fluctuate" according to demand (in quotation marks because the pricing isn't fluctuating like they said it would).
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No. All agency pricing means is that the retailer acts as an "agent" for the publisher (including a self-published author), selling the book to the consumer at the publisher's price and taking a certain cut from the sale. This is the same model ebay uses.
The term is a neutral term; the reason people don't like Big 5 agency pricing really has nothing to do with agency pricing at all; it has to do with the fact that the prices set by the publishers are seen as being too high. If the big 5 set their new release prices at $8.99, no one would complain about agency pricing - if anything, people would complain about how Amazon ripped consumers off by jacking up prices to $9.99.