Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
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.
|
The fallacy of saying that just because some author (who wasn't Scalzi btw) says it's not accurate for him doesn't mean that it's all wrong, is that the bottom line is there is no way to validate Author Earnings because very few authors and no publishers release that data. All the hand waving and detailed explanations of methodology doesn't change that. It doesn't matter what your methodology is if you don't have good data, and Author Earnings doesn't have accurate data since accurate data isn't available. The fact that a particular book is 253rd on the Amazon SF/Space Opera list doesn't really imply anything other than it sold more at Amazon than the 254th book and less than the 252nd book.
The idea that it's gone commercial implies that it's accurate is a fallacy. The fact that it's gone commercial doesn't imply anything other than they think they can get someone to buy their product. It's not surprising. Nature abhors a vacuum and all sorts of people in the industry (authors, reporters, etc) are looking for some data, any data that people are going to buy it. We see that here.
It's pretty hard to characterize Indies as a group. It's a very divergent group. Some do a lot of research and experimentation, and others just follow the crowd. Some are just trying to make a quick buck by gaming the system, others are sure they are the next great writer and luck to sell 20 copies of any of their books, other are successful writers, but not great business people and a few a both good writers and successful on the business side, some have their own publishing companies and offer both ebooks and paper books.
As far as I can tell, the two major models are pump out as many books as you can and use lower prices (Christopher Nutall is an example) and put the books two or three books a year for prices closer to traditional publishers.