Quote:
Originally Posted by Timboli
[...] Why is it, that many authors and publishers, can get away with doing the right thing and playing fair with prices, but others can't?
This is not an Indie vs Traditional question. There are those out there that publish physical and digital books, and do so with decent fair prices, and have been doing so for many years.
If their model was not working economically, they have had plenty of opportunity to change that model. In fact, they could make a plea and join the ranks of the over-pricers, and say it is not viable to be cheaper. The more in that camp, the harder for us to prosecute an alternative argument.
Myself personally, I can only draw one conclusion ... the same one many others have.
I'd love to see a breakdown of what it costs to make a book and why, and why there is a need to get extra profit from ebooks. [...]
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Many Indy authors also publish paper and digital, and not always under an obviously Indy name - so you can't always easily tell just by looking at the publisher name.
You cannot assess the situation by looking at just a few titles. For Indy authors/publishers the question of "working economically" is quite variable (we'd all love to make a living from it, but a more realistic expectation is supplemental income and we all have different expectations of what makes an acceptable supplement). For non-Indy publishers you need to look across a wide selection of the books they publish, because publishing has always been about using very good investments to support the new stuff that may or may not turn out to be good.
Your search for people "playing fair" is a search for an illusion because every person's idea of "fair" is different and sometimes quite arbitrary.
Take, for example, one Indy author that I know that would like to make $x per book, whether paper and ebook, and so sets the prices to ensure that minimum. It should be obvious to all that $x is entirely arbitrary, and the next Indy author I meet may well use $y.
Capitalist economics is not about fairness or justice, it's about what the market will bear. This is especially true with luxury items, and books are luxury items (as has been pointed out previously).