[Darqref]

I think "improving" ebook publishing will fall into 4 areas that can be summed up as "making it easier".

1. Price. You may be tempted to say cheap, Cheap, CHEAP. However, I think its more accurate to find a price that's considered fair, which might not be the cheapest. (An illustrating tangent: Those who have been around Baen's Bar for a long time will remember the OLD price for Webscriptions. Barflies were worried that the price for webscriptions were too low to give an adequate royalty to the authors, especially if buying the webscription might replace buying a paper copy. Jim Baen had originally started the Webscription program as an advertising expense (which REALLY worked, by the way) to drive pre-orders of books. After kicking around the idea, the monthly webscription price increased a couple of bucks, apparently with very mild grumbling and much more acclaim. We want our authors to be happy with the webscription sales!)

If the price is high enough that you look elsewhere, then not only have you encouraged the darknet, but you may induce those you are are spending their discretionary funds to spend elsewhere. Eric Flint keeps saying "we're competing for their BEER money, folks". Conversely, if the price is cheap enough, you're tempted to buy it just to try it, because you don't feel cheated. (Freqently observed Webscription comment- "I'd spend that much just for the Flint and the Weber; now who's this new author included in the package?")

2. Ease of use. Is the ebook easy to use? DRM hurts here, even if only because it forces you look for the correct file. Even in drm-free forms, it really helps to have a file available in the format needed. Yes, it's good to have a format that can be flexibly transformed, but, as an author (or publisher) wouldn't you rather have at least the first suggestion for how you'd like it to look? I have a Rocket, and a bunch of people download one or another version and then convert to rb format. I find it easy (enough) to just use the rb versions that Baen makes available. I might change that pattern when I finally buy an eInk device, but I'd at least try the native-format first.

Similarly, bad text formatting or grammar errors (compared to print versions, anyway) detract from ease of use. A file format that specifies too small of font. Improperly displayed umlauts and such in foreign names. Anything that makes you start to think "I could do better than that!"

3. Ease of Finding. This might be MUCH more important than you might think. Eric Flint (boy, he makes a lot of quotable remarks, doncha think?) frequently challenges people to find his books for free. Then pay attention to how LONG it took you to find and download, compared to just paying for it at Baen, as well as the effort to get it into the right format, and possibly correct scanning mistakes.

I pay attention to Fictionwise, since they're happy to send me a list every week of the books they are adding. Much less frequently, I go back and browse through the categories to find something older, because its a bit more of a pain. On the other hand, I find it almost excruciating to find publishing info for the various imprints under the Penguin brand, let alone whether they even HAVE an ebook version. I think their website is impossibly difficult, and it's almost too much work to find the old DAW and ACE imprints.

The bottom line is to make it so much easier to FIND the legal ebook to purchase, that it becomes a pain to go elsewhere. This might take extra effort from a publisher to make sure search engines will find your author's books on your site. And make sure it's easy to find a list of what you've published this month and what you're going to publish in the next month or two!

4. Service and customer interaction. This might also cover some of the "value added" features on the other thread. One of the reasons Baen is so passionately defended, is that the Baen's Bar community interacts with *most* of the authors and the publisher regularly. It's sometimes fun to find out that Ringo is have trouble coming up with a proper name for an upcoming book (at least one that isn't vaguely pornographic), or how many places Joe Buckley has been red-shirted, and we've been downhearted about the recent death of Toni's husband. Questions tend to get answered quickly, even if the answer is "that's still under negotiation". Maybe other publishers have similar online communities, but at least in the SF field, I haven't found them on the publisher's website.


In summary: If we can get online publishers to make improvements in any or all of these areas, I think their sales will improve, and their "non-sales" will decrease, at least in proportion.