Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
If Amazon makes more money at $9.99, then the publishers would make more money as well.
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Not necessarily true. The publisher and the author bear all the upfront costs and risks; the only thing Amazon bears is a bit of cyberspace. Every ebook sold by Amazon is profit to Amazon, whether the selling price be $1 or $15. That is not true for publishers or authors.
The breakeven number for a publisher might be 100,000 sales so that a profit first occurs with sale 100,001. In contrast, Amazon's first profit is with the sale of the very first unit.
If your statement is meant only to reflect that a publisher may make a larger gross via volume sales at the $9.99 price point, that is unproven. Although Amazon has given us an aggregate overview, that is, Amazon will sell from its entire catalog 174,000 at $9.99 for every 100,000 units priced at $14.99, Amazon hasn't separated out of those gross sales all non-big-5 books.
To know whether Amazon is right or wrong for anyone but Amazon, we need to know the differential for Hachette sales at $9.99 and $14.99. And that differential should be of the same items, that is, sales of, for example, the newest Rowling book at each price point. It might well be that Amazon's numbers hold up, or it might be that Rowling will sell only 1,000 more units at the lower price point and thus no benefit to either the publisher or Rowling.
Amazon's data are so incomplete that they amount to little more than puffery, contrary to what some seem to believe.