Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Agency pricing was used to try to get Amazon and that had the side effect of getting the customer. Amazon is still here and a lot of little stores are gone. That's because of Agency. Agency does alienate a lot of customers.
And now with Covid-19 and a lot of people are not making enough money to buy Trade paperbacks.
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Plenty of customers buy ebooks and audiobooks. Just because you hate that practice doesn't imply that every customer does. It just implies that you have become obsessive about it. Amazon has Amazon unlimited if cheap ebooks is your thing. You can even download PD books. There are price points out there for all taste. What you don't get is big name authors dirt cheap. I wish I could get Ribeye steaks for the cost of Ramen noodles. That doesn't imply that the butcher is over charging for steak. He's only over charging for steak if he has to throw steak away because no one is buying it. It's economics 101.
We were assured by some here that all the big authors were going to move to self publishing because publishers provided no value and charged too much. Hasn't happened and they have pretty much gone quiet on the assertion now that self publishing on Amazon has been a thing for a while. Some authors make good money as independents. Others are luck to sell a couple of books to their friends and family. Some authors are moving to setting up their own publishing companies, though their price points seem to be very close to the big 5 price points. Most of the big name authors stick with their publishers for the simple reason that they are making good money that way, get nice upfront payments and they like leaving everything except the writing to the publisher. For the authors that I read who set up their own publishing companies, it seems to be more of a control thing than a price thing.