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Originally Posted by darryl
I'm not sure what the data says about movements. Certainly some authors with huge Indie success are then signing traditional contracts, but often very limited ones. In the meantime many of the mid-list authors dumped by traditional publishing are going Indie.
I think the major reason for the different price points is that one focuses on ebooks with print books very much ancillary, whilst the other focuses on print books with ebooks very much ancillary. Another significant reason, of course, is that Indie pricing is subject to competition, whilst agency pricing is not. I think the two markets are in fact in competition. With Big 5 ebooks far more expensive what was happening when last properly reported on is what one would expect to happen in the absence of a price reduction. Increasing Indie ebook market share at the expense of the Big 5 and other Tradpubs which follow their pricing lead. There are of course some traditional publishers outside of the Big 5 who do compete with Indie's on both price and royalties.
Is is unfortunate that we no longer have the benefit of Author Earnings Reports to give us some reasonable idea of what is happening and whether the Indie share of the ebook market continues to increase. Also interesting would be to what extent the ebook market and print book market are growing (or otherwise)>
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I suppose it's possible there is a big flux of authors moving from traditional to indie in genres that I don't follow, but I haven't seen it in the SF&F genre. I do see backlist books showing up as indie, or at least with publishers who specialize in publishing backlist books, but I'm not seeing new books coming out as indie from writers who use to be traditional. There are some who had been dropped by their previous publishers due to drops in sales, but only a hand full that I can think of.
As far as Author Earnings goes, I know that some here take it as gospel, but when someone who actually knows the sales figures says they are orders of magnitude off for their specific sales, I figure it's likely that they are orders of magnitude off for other sales as well.
I suspect that the biggest growth market is audio rather than print or ebook.