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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
The agent will sit down with the publisher's contracts folks to negotiate a deal. (And it's why you want an agent. An agent can negotiate a contract better than you can - it's her job.) A contract is agreed upon and an advance is offered to the author for the right to publish the book.
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Dennis. Your post has much in it which I think is of merit. But I certainly take issue with the above. Authors should certainly read the various posts and books on the subject by Kristine Kathryn Rusch before committing their fortunes to an agent. The conclusion is obvious. Don't. Use a lawyer or other professional negotiator. The main value of agents now is, at least in my view, to get your foot in the front door of traditional publishing. Of course this assumes that there is value in going tradpub, which is by no means true for many authors.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Please note that all of those costs are incurred before the book is actually published in print or electronic form. Tell me which you think can be dropped to lower the cost enough to let you get a cheaper price?
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The only ones who can really answer this one are the publishers themselves, and possibly in relation to each individual book. I would ask instead, are there no worthwhile cost savings to be found anywhere in the process? Is it totally efficient? I would be very surprised to see such efficiency in an industry dominated by an oligopoly with no price competition at the retail level, at least before the success of the Kindle and KDP. Having said that, Tradpub books are never going to be able to compete on price with lower-tier less professional Indies who simply don't pay for professional editing, covers etc. Nor would they want to. The Indies they are competing with are usually those produced with the help of professionals and incurring some or all of the same costs. Some of these Indies are e-book only with even further cost advantages and far less complex considerations in price setting. Even the Big 5 are experimenting with their pricing, but some of the more innovative publishers using a tradpub model are doing well at lower prices.
I once thought differently but now I just can't see New Release Big 5 e-books ever being priced significantly cheaper than their print counterparts. Why on earth would a Big 5 publisher ever risk cannibalising its new release print book sales with a cheaper e-book. Far better to pick up the print book sales for each edition, pick up the e-book sales at the higher price and only then pick up e-book sales at Indie-competitive prices. After all, the results of this poll, imperfect as it is, indicate that this practice does not lose a large volume of sales, with most who won't pay the full price prepared to pick the e-book up when the price comes down. If anything, I can see some of the more successful Indie authors at least experimenting with raising their initial prices to capture sales from those who are prepared to pay the higher price rather than wait.