Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
You do understand that the term earn out means that authors are actually paid an advance, i.e. money up front, the amount of which is dependent on how many books they are expected to sell, so it's not like the author doesn't get the money from the book I buy.
I really don't care if an author is tradition publisher or indie, I just care if I like their books. Of course, the downside to indies is that they sell mostly digital books, with little or no paper sales. Most paper sales seem to be on demand are are quite expensive. For example, a book I just purchased as an ebook cost $4 as an ebook, $25 as a hard back and $15 as a paper back. Yea, those traditional publisher prices ($7 ebook, $17 hard back, $7 paper back) don't look quite so bad in comparison.
That 70% sounds good until you realize that the indie is going to have to sell a lot more ebooks than the traditional publisher author to make the same money in total sales.
I suspect that the vast majority here buy ebooks rather than paper. Yet, digital books (both ebooks and audiobooks) is still a much lower percentage of sales than paper books overall.
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Indeed. Sometimes the advance is all a tradpub author gets. In which case the incentive in you paying top price is pretty well non-existent. Of course, since books do not have to earn out to be profitable to a publisher you may help indirectly in a small way by enhancing the prospects of the author again being published in the future. So yes, the author does get some money from the book you buy, at least on paper. But not very much. It's value as a financial incentive to write more books is debatable in most cases.
Of course, at a 15% royalty rate as opposed to a 70% one, the tradpup paper author must sell 4.66 books to make the same amount as an Indie would on a single sale. This, of course, assumes the same price which is not usually correct. But what it does mean is that an indie e-book author selling a book for $3.22 will receive the same royalty as a tradpub paperback author selling a book for $15. So in fact Indie authors usually need to sell less books to make the same money. Though of course the lower price points for Indies are I suspect more promotional than profitable.
What I find interesting about the POD prices you quote is how close the prices are to tradpub books. The savings from the massive economies of scale achieved by a tradpub print run are obviously ending up in someone's pocket. And not the readers or the authors.
I haven't seen recent figures, but the last I did see paper sales were still much higher, with tradpub e-book sales static and Indie e-book sales rising. I think there will be a market for paper books for the foreseeable future. And Indies are not prominent in paper books, with book stores often refusing to stock either Indies or Amazon imprint books. I suspect this is why some Indie authors do take tradpub contracts. I suspect they are usually for print rights only and for higher royalty rates than standard. But for Indies the print market is largely untapped.