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Originally Posted by darryl
We disagree about the characterisation of Indie book pricing as a "race to the bottom". And like it or not, in my view at least books are already a commodity and have been for a long time. We have disagreed about both of these things in the past and continue to do so. The publishing industry are pricing ebooks in what they consider their own best interests, which of course includes a consideration of the effect on print book sales, which most Indies do not seem to place a high emphasis on if they care at all. I don't like it very much, but it is certainly neither stupid nor unreasonable. They are making a good effort at having their cake and eating it to by reducing prices to Indie levels later to catch those who would not pay the initial price and having
It's a very interesting new world with ebooks and backlist. I do wonder what the real world data is for how sales have been changed by ebooks and audiobooks, but we aren't likely going to find that out unless individual authors decide to share that information. I haven't run across anyone actually doing it since Scalzi did it with Redshirts and Lockout, and that's been a while. sales and promotions.
A limited number of authors releasing data is interesting but of little value compared to more broad based analysis such as Author Earnings used to provide to the public. Somewhat ironically given its origins this data and analysis is now provided only to subscribing customers and is likely being used by the Big 5 together with other industry reports to inform their pricing decisions.
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Author Earnings is another area where you and I disagree. I've never really considered someone's wild ass guess, no matter how much hand waving and equations one uses, as the basis of a broad based analysis, especially given that authors have come out and said that the information in there for them was off by orders of magnitudes. If the people who are in a position to know tell me it's wrong, then I'm going to be very skeptical of it's accuracy.
You may consider books commodities, but book sales tend to be driven strongly by best selling authors. It's no different than movies in that respect. Race to the bottom doesn't imply Indies, or at least not all Indies. The ultimate race to the bottom is free fanfic, or PD books. Some people like it. More power to them. I've noticed that many of the Indies that I end up reading seem to settle for a price point quite a bit higher than the commodity Indies go for. For example, Glynn Stewart sells most of his books in the $4 to $5 range. Many of David Weber's books are in the $7 range. Not much of a difference. Personally, I don't find it terribly surprising that the Indie market has split up into a number of different price points, many of which are just a bit lower than the traditional publishers.