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Originally Posted by neilmarr
Good to have your company, Ray. Very best wishes from Neil at BeWrite Books.
Although I agree that ebook editions should never cost more than treebook editions, when it comes to ebook publication of existing catalogue titles it's a different thing.
Although we never price above half of paperback price for ebooks ($5.95 across the board), we save almost 40% on high per-item PoD print costs and can just about justify lower ebook prices and loss of print sales on that basis (even with some ebook-only releases recently). Bigger houses, though, who save only about 12% on print because mass-runs are so much cheaper -- and even taking into account warehousing, physical distribution and a return rate averaging around 50% -- do face a problem because most costs are constant and every treebook sale is likely to take away a treebook purchase.
We're all in a bit of a tizz over ebook cover-pricing right now, and the Agency 5 Model won't help publishers, retailers or readers any more than DRM does. I hope things will settle down much more quickly than they did when mass-run paperbacks were introduced in the last century and offer a fair deal all round to author, publisher, retailer and reader.
(And if you want a real rant, compare the current ebook retail store sales commissions with the penal discounts that have been demanded by brick and mortar stores in the past -- some make the high street bookshop owner/manager look like a philanthropist. How can that be justified in a no-risk, no inventor, shoe-string cost operation offering nothing but a place among throusands in a crowded and virtual shop window display?)
Cheers. Neil
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Hello Neil. No doubt about it, the larger publishers face many problems we don't have to contend with. However, prior to the creation of ePublishing, they also enjoyed advantages over smaller publishers because they could get their books printed offshore so inexpensively. Win some, lose some, I guess.
We price our books at $6.99 across the board, which I believe is a fair price.
--Ray Hoy, Publisher
The Fiction Works
http://www.fictionworks.com