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Old 12-14-2010, 01:03 AM   #41
Elfwreck
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney View Post
Baen does it through small size, low overhead, and focus. Tell me how you expect a major trade house to emulate that model?
1) By studying their target sales audiences, and coordinating smaller publishing groups as necessary to reach them. Some additional costs would be expected in the coordination, so maybe they have to produce $8-10 ebooks, instead of $4-6 ebooks.

I really don't get the argument, "they're so big that everything they do costs more and you have to pay for that." I thought the idea of getting big, was that production would cost less and there'd be more profit at the same price level.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H. View Post
Where's the evidence that Baen is "raking in money?"
I may have misphrased. I was thinking that Baen is plenty profitable, and Harlequin is raking in money. I remember hearing that Baen makes more selling ebooks than their entire line of non-US pbooks, and that they have a 70% sell-through rate on hardcovers. I don't have links for those numbers.

There's an interview earlier this year with Toni Weisskopf, publisher of Baen Books, where no hard numbers are mentioned, but there's certainly none of the "how will we *ever* manage to pull a profit from ebooks?" attitude that many other publishers manage to convey.
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