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Originally Posted by stonetools
Note that despite the popular meme here that authors and BPHs are opposed, in the end they are on the same side.They are both in the book creation game-which is why authors are supporting the BPHs in this dispute.
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Some authors are supporting the BPHs. Authors who are making a living away from them, are not. Some of the authors who are making a living with them, aren't happy about their activities. When almost 2/3 of a group of employees (or clients, or whatever authors are to BPHs) would switch to a different company *for the same amount of money*... they're doing something wrong.
Several BPHs seem to have the attitude of, "as long as we all offer the *same* lousy terms to authors, none of us will have problems signing on enough talent, because there's nowhere else they can go."
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Both are eating from the same pot-which is why there are going to oppose those who might want to make that pot smaller.
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They're not eating from the same pot. That's part of the BPH propaganda: that only X people are reading, and they're only willing to spend Y dollars, and therefore all marketing, contract negotiations, and sales venues are a zero-sum game; there's no *gain* in ebooks, just a transfer of income from paper to e-formats.
It's not true. John Locke sold a million one-dollar ebooks to people who would never have bought a paper copy. There's no evidence *at all* that he would have sold 200,000 paper books at $4.99 instead; his ebook market didn't cut into the paper market. Konrath's publishing house believes that his ebooks "need" to be priced at $7-12 to profit; Konrath's self-releases are proving that very wrong.
BPHs are invested in selling books to their known market pool. Indie authors are able to look outside of that, to people who never bought books directly from BPHs--both the used-book market that's happy to buy books at $4 or less, regardless of whether those books give royalties to authors, and a large market of mostly-non-readers who will try books if they're convenient enough.
BPHs are trying to push ebooks on them, and making decent sales with their $12.99 sales pitches. And then they're *losing* those customers as they slowly figure out that a BPH logo is not a mark of literary or formatting quality in ebooks, and with a bit of time spent reading reviews, they can happily glut themselves on $4 books that are just as enjoyable.