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Originally Posted by MikeB1972
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).
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I haven't seen a single person say that they ONLY read public domain. I've seen quite a few people say that they read free books (PD and otherwise) while they save up to buy the crucial titles they can't pass up. This data point would seem to prove MY point: if Bob REALLY wants to read "A Dance With Dragons", he's going to buy it no matter how many copies of "Little Women" and "Pride and Prejudice" he has for free on his eReader.
If your argument is that someone, somewhere, is ONLY reading free books and that that somehow magically cannibalizes the backlist on a large scale, I don't know what to say to that. You do realize there will always be free books, right? No matter how much price-fixing Knopf and the rest of the big publishers do. So those "I only read free books" customers -- wherever they are -- are already lost. Knopf bringing down the price of Faulkner to suit ME isn't going to affect those "free only" customers one way or the other.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeB1972
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.
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You're assuming that all authors in a genre are interchangeable to readers and the only difference is the price point. This is ludicrous. If Galenorn's next Sisters of the Moon book is under $20, I WILL buy it. If Butcher's next Dresden book is given away with a $30 check, I still won't accept it. This is a matter of personal taste.