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Ebooks at our own store (link below), Caz, are already available in all popular formats at regular cover price ($5.95 across the board). Some other indie publishers have their own stores as well as, like us, using the big third-party outlets for the bulk of sales. Always worth checking.
(Some third-party retailers' sales commissions are penal -- Sony, for instance is 70% across the board and Amazon's Kindle store snatches 70% of sales outside the US, Canada and UK. They also load ebook prices outside these favoured areas by about four bucks [but pay publisher return only on RRP] for no reason that's ever been adequately explained. Our own store takes no sales commission at all, so royalties for much higher-than-usual author, artist, editor, designer, technical input, etc, remain 100% intact.)
If you want to browse the catalogue (usually around 150 titles) and two or three catch your eye, drop me a line of the titles and your preferred format and I'll be happy to send them along with our compliments.
SAME APPLIES to anyone else contributing to this thread. ntmarrATbewrite.net (but use the @ sign, of course).
Where Ingram/LS will make a bigger difference will be on the print scene Down Under and in other Pacific Rim countries where the reading public has been stuck with ridiculous brick-and-mortar cover prices for far too long, or who buy more cheaply on line, only to be lumbered with slow and expensive international shipping.
Directly, it won't make a great difference to ebook folks. Indirectly, though, it might. As your grubby-fingered shop keepers lose their grip on the book trade, more and more in Oz and NZ turn to the realistic ebook option. And this Ingram/LS move will be one of the last nails in the high street coffin.
A word of warning, though: Beware some of your locally-based ebook retailers. I've checked them out and many are following the Australian brick-and-mortar policy of artificially inflating cover price way beyond the publisher's RRP. Some crazy prices out there.
As more and more stores, publishers, agents and their authors come to understand the importance of international digital rights on a title, though, (and they MUST) your local ebook dealers will either have to knuckle under to consumer pressure and international competition and price reasonably or shut up shop.
The Welsh half of my family (babies now popping up as the fourth generation) have lived in Australia since the mid-sixties. So I confess to a personal interest. You guys bravely battle through the most horrendous natural disasters. You can do without having to struggle with the frustration of man-made troubles, too.
Bestests. Neil
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