Quote:
Originally Posted by Trenien
So far the only ebooks' economical model that I've heard of having any kind of success (i.e. that earned a living for the author) was the one where the ebooks are free to download and considered advertising toward the sales of physical books.
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Um.... Baen has shown that eBooks are nicely profitable in their own right, even when they pay their full share of the fixed costs of publication. When sold as part of a WebScriptions bundle (everything Baen publishes in a particular month, minimum four books never before in bits, for $15) both publisher and author do somewhat better than on a paperback sale in the bookstore. At the single-copy price of $6, publisher and author do better than large-format paperback, and almost as well as hardcover.
They're not yet selling enough bits to run the business without any dead trees, but the eBooks are generating "more revenue than all non-US sales combined." Actually, they hit that point about three years ago; sale of bits has continued to climb since. Other numbers suggest that non-US sales make up something between 15% and 25% of the total, which lets us infer something about the size of electronic sales as well.
Plenty of authors have commented that Baen is the only company from which the royalties on eSales (over one 6-month royalty period) buy more than a Big Mac. One author described the e-sales part of her royalty statement as "more than meal money, not yet mortgage money... call it car-payment money."
Xenophon
P.S. eSales have
also helped drive paper sales, as has the Baen Free Library. Some argue that this is the more important effect overall, but I've not heard that particular argument from insiders with real numbers at their fingertips. Nevertheless, sales of eBooks are certainly both profitable
and a significant part of the total income picture at Baen.