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Originally Posted by pwalker8
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.
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My attitude is indeed different to Author Earnings, and we have discussed this in the past. It wasn't completely accurate, nor did it pretend to be. But it was far from a "wild ass guess". It used actual data from various sources, including Amazon, and was absolutely transparent in its methodology which was greatly improved over time because of this. That it was not accurate in relation to Scalzi or even a small number of other authors who release their figures, even by "orders of magnitude", does not mean it was off by orders of magnitude overall. It simply highlights a weakness in data or algorithms which warranted investigation and may or may not have had a significant effect overall. Certainly more traditional sources were far less accurate because they chose to simply ignore the Indie market. Now the Author Earnings methodology has sadly been taken commercial, perhaps we can infer something from the fact that Publishers and others are paying significant amounts for this "wild ass guess".
So far as PD books are concerned, they are not generally part of your so-called race to the bottom. Mostly they have finally reached the Public Domain after the expiry of some mostly very lengthy copyright terms. Fan fiction is just that. I myself am not a reader of it, though I hear that there are some stories of very high quality, though these are apparently more the exception. I would have thought such stories are not in competition with either Indie or Tradpub books. In fact quite the opposite. I imagine that fan fiction is a great promotional tool which satiates the voracious appetite for fanatical fans, who mostly buy new "official" books at top price as soon as they become available.
As you have pointed out on many occasions, the print book model was always to extract the maximum revenue, first with a "premium" hard cover release to be followed over time by releases at successively lower price points, usually ending a year or so after release with a mass market paperback. I think the same principle is being applied now to ebooks, with those wanting to buy at lower prices eventually being able to do so. No money is being left on the table. Some sales are of course being lost, but it seems not enough to make this strategy nonviable. It is rational and well thought out, protecting the print book business at the higher prices, extracting more from those wanting an ebook and not prepared to wait, and then picking up the remaining revenue available only at lower prices. It is only these lower priced Big 5 ebooks which compete on price with the higher priced Indies.