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Originally Posted by anamardoll
And a $1.99 price only "cuts into profits" if comparable numbers of people would have bought at the $9.99 price. Assuming that is assuming facts very much not in evidence. I have no doubt that your reasoning matches the publishers' reasoning, but I think it's based on wrong starting assumptions.
And this is a classic case of not understanding the market. The idea that I won't buy Galenorn's new Sisters of the Moon book for $9.99 because I spent all my money on Faulkner's "Sound and the Fury" at $2.99 and now I'm good, thanks, totally misunderstands book buying habits. The idea that the backlist cannibalizes the current market is, in my personal opinion, silly.
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This is where we have a difference of opinion, the backlist does cannibalise the current market - How many people have said, here on mobileread, that they only read PD books now (and you can't get more backlist than someone who has been dead for more than 70 years).
Quote:
Originally Posted by anamardoll
It will compete because readers have different preferences and different shopping habits. It will compete because it's a different author, a different genre, and a different book altogether. It will compete because -- again -- readers aren't just wallets flying towards the smallest price point.
I'm not buying up Harlequin romance novels at $4 a pop and neglecting new fantasy lit at $6 because, HEY BARGAIN, because I don't like romance novels. If the slippery slope argument were true, all our base would already belong to Harlequin and Knopf and Scholastic wouldn't even exist.
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It's not about buying a harlequin romance instead of a SF book (sorry switched to SF, never sure what people class as fantasy nowadays).
Its about buying Robery Sawyers's Hominids instead of Peter F Hamilton's Evolutionary Void, both good books, both worth reading, but with Sawyer's published back in 2003.
If your into vampires there is a ton of backlist stuff that can directly compete with anything produced now (Tanya Huff, Nancy Collins etc).
And if your competing with the backlist for historical fiction your in big trouble.
Like horror? Then try James Herbert, Steven King, Dean Koontz etc - hundreds of backlist books just as good as anything new.
The problem is that, whatever your genre, there is a huge backlist that you havn't read (and lots of it published by the publisher trying to sell you that new book)
I agree that you may buy the shiny new book from your favourite author, but if your looking for a new book in <insert genre here>, why buy one for $10 when you can buy one for $2? Just as good, from the same publisher - in fact you can probably read better ones from the back list, just start going through the <insert favourite award here> winners and nominees.
Hell, I've still not read all of the Nebula award winners, price all of them at $2 and I'll buy them tomorrow - of course I wont need to buy anything for the next 2 years. so some publisher somewhere is losing a ton of money from me.