Quote:
Originally Posted by Dimwit
As for profitability of epubs, yes, there's no printing, warehousing or return issues but that doesn't mean that doing an epub is free. Good, professional level editing and proofreading is expensive and should be and doing a good and again, professional, layout isn't free either. Going that route has upfront costs but the ultimate package is *worth* something. Otherwise it becomes the same as a paint-by-numbers picture at a garage sale. "You want HOW much for that?!"
|
My reply was to the following:
"Particularly considering how many books lose money anyway."
I was attempting to address the fact that most of the factors that a pbook
can show as things that describe the reasons the book looses money, do
not apply to ebooks. The cost of creating the book as a viable manuscript
(normally now in the form of an electronic document), is the same for both
pbooks and ebooks. While in many cases a publishing house will be involved
in the process, there are now other options open to an aspiring, as well as
accomplished author.
The question might become, for the ebook author, whether the publishing
house who's accounting "must balance the losses of all the other books",
both pbooks and ebooks against the return from your ebook, is the author's
best choice. Between the writing tools now available, the support of paid
and unpaid proofreaders, and independent editing services, what is needed
to get a manuscript to the condition that you can make your own ebook file,
is within most author's reach.
There are a number of skills that any author has to develop to be successful,
at one time that included good quill penmanship, now a days an author can
actually gain most of the means to produce his own ebooks, with less and
less help from the "pros", over that development. I would think that there
are a number of writers in this forum who are either already there or well on
the way, to not really needing an established publishing house's involvement
in their ebook production.
Marketing is another story.
Luck;
Ken