Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
Baen did not raise prices and start selling on Amazon because they felt threatened by Amazon.
They did so because they felt they were leaving good money on the table otherwise
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And because some of the money they were leaving on the table "belonged" to their authors.
Publishers are middlemen and their "strategic" decisions impact the livelihood of the authors who trusted them to bring their books to market. Usually negatively. Most of the negative things whiney authors attribute to evil Amazon (c.f., LeGuin, Ursula) are longstanding practices of the corporate publishers or recent reinterpretations of embedded clauses that are only now starting to bite.
Any rational analysis of the evolution of the US ebook market can easily show that the bulk of the damage to the establishment players is self-inflicted. The BPHs and their cronies started toppling dominoes and didn't think things through. Not with the conspiracy, not with their contract practices, and not with their recent price hikes:
http://www.bookbusinessmag.com/post/...costly-ebooks/
Right now it looks like they've traded a 10% decline in the high margin ebook format in return for a 1% boost in their low margin pbook formats. Which boost is due mostly to Amazon aggressively discounting pbooks. And is helping boost Indie book sales. Yeah, that is going to reduce Amazon's marketshare...
What it is doing, however, is reducing their authors incomes. Especially the dreamers who agreed to ebook-only contracts.
Baen took steps to boost author incomes but their bigger competitors up north are actively engaged in reducing them. All in the name of strategy.