Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
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.
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You last point first, yes, I've read authors say that because of the breakout of their sales (print, audio, ebook), they thought that going indie would simply be leaving money on the table. I suspect that the pros and cons of indie verse traditional publisher tends to vary from writer to writer.
As far as not paying the writer if he doesn't earn out, I think you are simply trying to play semantics games to make it sound like the author gets no benefit if I buy his book. I buy the book from a merchant and the purchase is eventually credited to the account of author. Advances are based on expected sales. Authors who don't earn out, either don't get new contracts or get lesser advances. A sale is a sale.
POD - print cost are really a small part of the actual price of a print book. Someone in the publishing business broke out the cost a while back in one of the threads that I read on this forum. If I recall correctly it came to perhaps a couple of dollars. I suspect that print cost of POD is a bit higher than that, but the equipment prices have really come down a lot. It's the same reason that many musicians have their own recording studio at home now. The prices have come down to a point that it's affordable.
If I recall correctly, Jim Baen mentioned a number of years ago that he, like most publishers sub contract out the actual printing and there are a handful of printing companies that handles most of the book printing. This was part of the explanation of why it took so long from when an author handed in the finished manuscript to when it was actually published. They had to schedule the print run some 6 months in advance. I suspect this hasn't changed all that much. Of course, boutique printing, i.e. custom printing a book and having it hand bound, is much, much more labor intensive and expensive. (A friend of mine's daughter working in such an operation in NYC as an intern one summer)