Quote:
Originally Posted by DrNefario
$6 is kind of already a sale price...
They do also provide bundles, and they often seem to combine older books into omnibuses for the same price, or less.
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I wouldn't say $6 is a sale price unless you are used to Tor's Agency Pricing scam. Rather $6 is a fair price for an SF genre mass-market ebook.
Baen's monthly bundles are their "sales" as you can get your average ebook price down to as low as $3 if you didn't already have anything in the bundle. ($4.50 if you only consider the new releases.)
Those are all good prices but their model is a lot like no-haggle auto dealers: the price is fixed and your only concern is wheher you like the product enough to buy it or not. Price is not a discriminator. A high-seller like Weber costs the same as a slow seller. In that they are a lot like the PriceFix Six who don't allow for lower prices for mid-listers and expect newcomers' books to sell at prices similar to those of established authors. Honestly? Sub-optimal for everybody involved.
Nate has an article on his web site right now highlighting how times have changed in the ebook business since the Library was first launched:
http://www.the-digital-reader.com/20...in-in-the-ass/
And his point there is something that bears some thought: segregating free ebooks into a separate purely promotional site with minimal ties to the main BAEN ebooks site is something that bears re-evaluation in view of the way the major ebookstores commingle free ebooks with the paid books from the same author. When the primary goal of the free ebooks was to drive print sales aggregating the freebies made sense because the expected next move was to go get the print book from a B&M or online bookstore.
Now, the expected next move is the go to BAEN eBooks site for other eboks from the author.
The Library has in fact changed its organization in recent times but it still isn't as effective as it could be. For example, it and the BAEN website let you sort their catalogs by author but all you get is a listing of titles instead of an Amazon-style author page. In the main site you can get a listing of the various series but no promotional overview of those series. They have social media sites for the various series but they're run separately, over in the BAR website.
Those may be good moves.
Or they may be dated.
BAEN has always been open to experimentation and reevaluating what they're doing in terms of whether it best serves the authors and the consumers is not a bad thing.
Well-run companies constanty question what they are doing instead of just doing what they've always done simply because it is what they've always done.
It may result in changes we don't exactly like or it could result in a more modern and effective approach. We'll just have to wait and see.