Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
18% of a big marketing campaign can be a lot better than 70% of a blog-based push for readers. However, for authors to accept that in the future, the publishers will have to convince the authors there will actually be an advertising campaign.
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How often do you think Trad pub advertising results in a 4X sales increase? To surrender 75% of the per unit income (at a constant price) that advertising is going to have to convince 4 times as many people to buy.
Of course, with typically-higher Trad-pub'ed pricing, the advertising not only has to convince people the book is worth reading, but also worth paying 2-5x as much as a self-pub'ed title. Might not the two effects (ads and higher price) cancel out? In other words, what if the advertising is needed merely to offset the lost sales due to the higher price?
Writers have to take a lot of things on faith regardless of the path they take to market. I'm thinking it will be a few years before there is enough data to measure the price elasticity of ebooks with any meaningful accuracy. Once that is known, we'll know if Trad-publishers (and advertising, if any) actually provide added value, instead of taking it on faith.
Until then, all we have is stuff like this interesting (but at least partly self-serving) analysis:
http://blog.smashwords.com/2012/07/h...ould-harm.html
If we believe Coker, a 3-4X price increase results in something like an 85% drop in unit sales. I'd like to see where he gets those numbers but they sound like a start for a proper discussion of price elasticity.
Edit: this thread is probably not the best place for that discussion. Maybe a new thread in General discussions?