Quote:
Originally Posted by Adele Ward
With the prices in Australia, all I can say is that Amazon give us only 35% of the price of the ebook there.They keep 65%. This is really annoying and hasn't made us change the price in Australia. Our prices are consistent across the world. Australia is actually important to us as we have a following there for reasons I won't go into here.
We only realised it over Christmas during our first promotion of ebooks. People tend to buy ebooks as a last-minute present. Suddenly I saw the really low 'royalties' as Amazon call them, even though we're the publisher. They have clauses that let them pay us commission at all sorts of varying levels. If prices have gone up in Australia I can only imagine that's the reason. It might be impossible for some publishers to recuperate costs when they only get 35%.
We do our editing and ebook conversions so, at the very worst, we would have to have done that for no income, and be able to give the author a royalty, which we can still do at 35%. If a publisher is paying somebody to do the ebook conversion, the editing and proofreading, they would need to recuperate that. By doing a lot of the work for free on these low income books in Australia and other countries we're still running at a loss because we could be doing paid work in that time, but authors do count and their books should be available everywhere.
There are problems with the way Amazon is paying. I think we'll see changes to this over the coming year - hopefully. They also ask us to put our books exclusively on the Kindle platform if we want to be in their lending library or taking part in special promotions, like giving the books away at times. This makes it even harder to offer the books at a competitive price for other ereaders and on other websites. Or to let authors sell their books on their own websites too using another format.
Amazon does dictate the terms at the moment because most ebooks are bought or downloaded free from them. We do need more freedom to be able to sell or give ebooks away from other websites in order to get past some of the problems mentioned in this discussion.
It's terrible that such large sections of the world are affected by a different pricing structure.
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Pretty sure Murdoch's pommie minions and others of that ilk would negotiate set payments for their titles and that wouldn't apply.