[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Shatzkin on the likely effect on authors and readers:
Over time, the biggest losers here will be the authors. The independent authors will feel the pain first. Agency pricing creates a zone of pricing they can occupy without much competition from branded merchandise. When the known authors are only available at $9.99 and up, the fledgling at $0.99-$2.99 looks very attractive and worth a try.

And he assumes that books by authors of the BPHs will be priced lower, which means, according to Shatzkin, that the indie authors will no longer be able to compete, because why would you buy a $4 book by an unknown author when you could get a $4 book by an author you know and like?

1) Because maybe you've already read that book. No author can keep up with my reading rate, and that's true for pretty much everyone, even very slow readers. After you've spent the $4 on Famous Author's New Book, you still have $6 left of the $10 you might've spent on it... and you might try an unknown with that money.

2) Because the cover & blurb for the unknown author sounds interesting. None of us got to be avid readers by only sticking with authors we knew and trusted to tell us a good story.

3) Because the unknown author's work comes with a bonus... "for the next week, send me proof-of-purchase, and I'll email you the cover art as desktop wallpaper."

4) Because Unknown Author's work is in the top 5 sellers for its genre and has 250 5-star ratings with insightful comments, so obviously a lot of people think it's good.

5) Because you ran across Unknown Author's blog and they have fascinating ideas and an engaging writing style, so you're willing to try one of their books.

The idea that removing agency pricing will *hurt authors* is... fascinating. It hinges on the notion that the general ebook-buying public is paying attention to who publishes what, and will limit their selections to BPH authors.

But, in the long run, all authors will just get less.

Unsaid: those working for 17.5% commission will get a lot less than those who set their own price per book.

They will join the legion of suppliers beholden to a retailer whose mission is to deliver the lowest possible price to the consumer.

That's pretty much what most retailers do. They're not in the industry to support the needs of suppliers... it's the suppliers' job to set rates that are profitable for them.

But what about the reader? The reader gets lower prices, cheaper reading. What the reader won’t see is that s/he’s not getting what s/he won’t pay for. Some of the best books won’t get written and the biggest casualties will be in the area of highly-researched non-fiction, like major biographies, in my opinion.

There's an opportunity to educate the public about the difference between fiction and nonfiction, by making fiction cheaper. For many decades now, the key factor in a book's price was its number of pages, not what kind of content it had. Fiction, essays, and fact-based books all cost the same.

Which puts to the test all the publishers' claims that production is really a small portion of the cost... if that's so, why does the tpb for Have Space Suit, Will Travel--a 50+ year old book with no notable editing or marketing costs anymore--cost $15 list, same as The Dogs of War, a book with more pages and a lot more factual details to check? Why is Wired for War priced the same as Dune in TPB?

...The answer, of course, is that books aren't priced according to how expensive they are to produce. They're priced according to what the market will bear. And if publishers want the market to bear costs of $10-20 for the ebooks that really do have extensive editorial costs, they'll need to find a way to pitch that.

... I sure see how easy it is for the government not to understand how their decisions might affect the dynamics of a business. Or, in this case, a culture.

I'll take seriously his claims that government is destroying culture when he adds "extending copyright past the Berne convention minimum" to the list of offenses.

I'm really not seeing how "encouraging low-price books" is going to destroy our culture. Does Shatzkin think people will spend less on books if their dollars buy more words?

Originally Posted by stonetools

I think a lot of folks here don't understand that one of the major services a publisher performs for an author is that they "share the risk" of a start up business. When a publisher advances money and provides editing, proofreading, cover art, and marketing services to a new author, the publisher is betting on an unproven product- being a venture capitalist as it where.

So, in the future, publishers will have to pay attention to what people will want to read, and guess more accurately which books have a viable market, and this is somehow bad for those of us who buy books?

"Support the publishers because without overcharging on all the books that sell, they wouldn't be able to produce all the schlock you had to wade through to find those?"

They could, perhaps, spend a bit less on NY office rents, and a bit more on figuring out what books will actually sell in what quantities. Get rid of the 30-50% return rate, and there's plenty of profit to invest in new authors.