Quote:
Originally Posted by Turtle91
...you illustrated my point perfectly! {snip}
I readily admit I don't know enough about the business side of ebooks. If BB charges money to take a book and convert (using a subcontractor) and distribute it to these different book retailers, wouldn't it be BB's responsibility (or their subcontractors) to make sure the conversion was done correctly?? Why on earth would the OP create all these different books himself and then pay for BB to send them to the retailer? Just send them to the retailer directly. I understand that Apple requires people to use a middleman when submitting books (??) but I was under the impression that the others have direct submission procedures. 
Maybe I'm asking too many questions and I just need to go back to Sigil and get to work...  |
Turtle:
Actually, you can only direct-publish to Amazon, B&N, Kobo and, if you have a Mac, Apple. All the rest--Sony, Diesel, BooksonBoard, whomever is still standing--they all require aggregators. That's the issue. For clients with a big reader-base in Europe, they need Sony. For clients who are based outside of the US--they need aggregators because they can't publish anywhere except Amazon and maybe Kobo. B&N requires a US Tax ID # and I think iBooks does,too. So, it's about distribution, more than anything else.
However, it's true that a little customer service would have gone a long way. On the other hand, to be fair to the aggregators, almost all of them, except BookBaby, have gone to a "no authors with fewer than 5 books" requirement, because the customer service (usually email) overhead with self-pubbing authors is so high that a single-book author costs them money, doesn't earn them money. Almost all of them used to take one-book clients; now only Smashwords and BookBaby will.
Think of it this way--with such a small intake fee, or even smaller percentage of sales, one email, or one phone call, and you're already in the hole. It's easy to think that businesses "should" provide better customer service, but ebooks is a teeny-weeny margin business. Consider this: if Bookbaby's net profit on a book is maybe $30, for a year--how many emails and phone calls can they field before that book puts them in the red? Or if it's one of the Aggregators that takes 15%--if the book sells $100/year--how many phone calls or emails consumes that $15 pretty damn quickly and puts it in the red?
And very, very few self-pubs have taken the time to educate themselves on what's involved with self-publishing. They haven't bought ISBN's, they didn't register their copyright, they don't know where to go to market the book; they don't know where to find their sales reports, or (I see this often with clients who cc: me on emails to their aggregators, I know not why), they write and say that the aggregator isn't giving them all their money, or that they want daily reports--it's pretty demanding, for very, very, very little money.
So...I sympathize; yes, BB should have explained the situation better; but at this moment in time, this particular OP is not even their client yet. He's a prospective client. Businesses like this, with such infinitesimal margins, have to dance a merry dance on the knife's edge of profitability when determining how much pre-sales "support" to give to someone who isn't even a paying client yet.
Just my $02, from someone who makes the same decisions every day.
Hitch