[fjtorres]

Sometimes I wonder if the people in the publishing business ever took economics 101.
Maybe they slept their way through it?
Do they not understand such a simple concept as price elasticity?
They clearly haven't a clue how to maximize back catalog value.

L. Sprague DeCamp? Very good writer. Very prolific. His catalog has quite a few excellent works. It also has its share of potboilers. Which just about screams: "Bundle!"
Instead of pricing each book as if it were some precious jewel or collectible, they should be bundling, omnibusing, and grab-bagging the heck out of his catalog, trying to maximize the return from the full catalog. As is, his top 5 or 6 works will sell decently among folks who already know of him, the rest might sell to afluent completists, and none will get much traction among those that aren't already familiar with his place in SF history.

Contrast that with how BAEN handles the works of Laumer, Schmitz, Anderson, Pournelle, Heinlein, Anvil etc. Pournelle's back catalog, for example, was intro'ed as a limited-time bundle at a modest but reasonable price, then sold unbundled at their normal reasonable pricing. The others are being slowly added to the Webscription store, get added to the monthly bundles where possibly unfamilar readers can be exposed to their works, and they even slip in a volume or two into the Free Library. Building awareness of the author and his works takes precedence over squeezing every last drop of blood from each buyer; setting the stage for followup sales over time matters more than "preserving perceived value".

It's still (relatively) early in the ebook evolution but you would think that by now more publishers would understand that midlist and (especially) backlist ebooks are long-term full-catalog plays. There is more money to be made by "selling" the L. Sprague DeCamp "brand" as a source of books that range from amusing to brilliant that there is from milking LEST DARKNESS FALL for every last penny. Short-term, quarter-by-quarter thinking *might* be vaguely justifiable in the world of batch-printed pbooks, but in the world of ebooks it is just a surefire way to send customers looking elsewhere.