Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Publishers release high-price hardbacks (and Baen release their high-price eArcs) because it works, of course. For popular authors, there will always be people willing to pay more for early access to the book. Their goal is to maximise income, not maximise the number of readers.
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Correct.
But their own suppliers, the authors, need to manage *their* brands and *they* need to worry about the number of readers.
BAEN only releases eArcs with established series from top selling authors (Weber, Ringo, Drake, Correia), not newcomers. What they do with newcomers is slot their titles in monthly bundles with the high profile titles go get them readers that way.
Unit sales matter. And BAEN does seem to try to maximize unit sales for their authors, especially on the ebook side. This is not true for all publishers. BAEN, as a smaller genre publisher knows that volume is critical to margins and that ebook volume is very good for margins as well as building up the author's fan base.
And if bestsellers is your business, you need volume.
Litfic is different--it is *never* going to achieve high volume--and premium pricing for niche products is quite sensible (as I pointed out above).
Remember, we aren't talking about all publishers here; we're talking about a very specific subset of five American companies whose primary revenue stream is NYT-anointed "bestsellers".
This is an industry segment that has been seeing essentially flat sales and profits since before ebooks hit the mainstream and who have been propping up their individual balance sheets thfough higher prices and by buying up market share in the form of other smaller publishers, thereby hiding the fact that even their *dollar* share of the market has declined. I.e., if you were to break out the random house and the penguin sides of the randy penguin and compare them to inflation-adjusted numbers from a decade ago you would see declines in both.
Faced with a choice of making more money by taking readers away from other publishers, the BPHs are choosing to squeeze more money out of less readers. This is not a risk-free strategy in a business where you are a middleman instead of a creator. And a business where there is no shortage of alternatives for both the readers and the authors.
In most discussions of price versus volume there is all too often the implied assumption that what is good for the publisher is good for the author and that is simply not true for the vast majority of authors.
Edit: consider this well-established (by now) trick:
https://andyrossagency.wordpress.com...hats-at-stake/
By setting the list price higher the publisher can trigger the deep discount clause at a higher retail price and cut author royalties in half while making more money for themselves.