Thanks for the (very quick) response, everyone. It's gratifying to see so much support.
There are a couple of points raised I'd like to address.
Firstly, from SirBruce:
"So if in order to keep prices low a publishers has to accept little to no profit on the first 50,000 copies, I'm not going to cry for them."
A typical genre bestseller sells far fewer than this number, so that's a major factor in setting out any pricing structure for any genre imprint. We'd love to sell 50,000 or each of our books, but it just isn't going to happen, so we have to price accordingly - to make a profit on a much lower number. If we don't, we stop publishing - it's as simple as that. Luckily, we have a model that will allow us to make sufficient profit to continue to publish. We're also lucky in that we're part of HarperCollins, so we can leverage their buying power when it comes to producing the pBooks.
And staying with SirBruce:
"You can't really address the misconception; the consumer won't believe you."
You're absolutely right. We can't educate the consumer to the intricacies of the publishing business. It's not just that they won't believe you, they just won't be interested enough to care. So, the way we address the issue is through pricing, but it's a delicate balance. It's a learning curve, all round.
A few people have brought up the issue of DRM. My opinion? It's Evil. It serves no-one.
Oh, and we won't be producing e-versions of original novels from scanned texts. All our eBooks will be produced from original text files - likely to be in ePub and Mobi versions, though I'd be interested to hear your views on the matter.
In response to MoeJoe's questions: Yes it was, yes he does and yes it is!
from Xenophon:
"if you do it right, the eBooks should not add much (if anything) to the marginal cost of producing a book. Yes, you still have all the fixed overhead and the per-book variable costs of editors, copy-editors, etc. -- but you had exactly the same costs without eBooks"
That's certainly true in the short term, but that would mean that you are producing an eBook as an afterthought to the production of the physical copy. For us, the eBook is an essential and integral part of the publishing model. It would be doing the format a disservice to say "you've produced the pBook, now do the electronic version". In future, as the gap between eBook and pBook numbers decreases, this will become even more evident. The eBook shares the fixed costs, it doesn't bypass them.
and also from Xenophon:
"Sales through your own site let you cut out the retailer"
Absolutely, but let's be realistic, here - the percentage of eBooks we sell from our own site (at least initially) will be
far lower than those we sell through retail channels.
I'm not going to comment on the rights issue, but in terms of bundling books - that's something we're certainly hoping to address once we have a bit more of a backlist.
Selling eARCs? That's an interesting idea. We currently make eARCs available to all our reviewers before the physical ARC is available, but I can confidently state we have not considered selling this version. First impressions are, I'm not 100% comfortable with this idea - the ARC, after all, is supposed to be a review tool, and selling it means you are making available via retail an imperfect item. Interesting, though, and I'll certainly bring the idea up.
and from mjh215:
"Treat your customers with respect".
Well, for us this is a given, and the main reason we started asking these questions in the first place.
On a personal note, I'm glad I've found this site. I've been reading eBooks for a little over 7 years, now (and I publish a weekly electronic fiction magazine at HubFiction.com </plug>) - I'll certainly be coming back.