[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by LeeH

Thanks for the (very quick) response, everyone. It's gratifying to see so much support.

And thank you for posting here and engaging!

Originally Posted by LeeH

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.

Over the *lifetime* of the book? C'mon, I think you'll sell a lot more than 50,000 copies. See, that's where pbook thinking doesn't apply to ebooks -- it costs nothing to maintain a back catalog. I'll accept that we're talking speculative fiction here and not mainstream titles. But regardless of the number, the point is, as others have pointed out, the more copies of the ebook you sell, the marginal cost per book decreases. So I don't expect you to maintain your target profit margin on the books that don't sell as well; your job is to throw lots of titles out there and let the bestsellers carry the day.

Originally Posted by LeeH

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.

Well, again, I think if you look at what Baen and Amazon are doing, you can't go wrong on pricing. But if you're looking for a price point that will make you stand out and move volume, I think $3 - $5 would draw a lot of attention.

Originally Posted by LeeH

A few people have brought up the issue of DRM. My opinion? It's Evil. It serves no-one.

Yay.

Originally Posted by LeeH

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.

EPUB and MOBI for sure. But the more formats the better; the smashwords data showed a fairly even distribution among various formats, and it didn't even include LIT.

Originally Posted by LeeH

The eBook shares the fixed costs, it doesn't bypass them.

True for new titles, but remember your back catalog! Well, I suppose your imprint doesn't have one but you should be able to tap into Eos and Voyager and Harper's older titles?

Originally Posted by LeeH

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.

For ebooks though this doesn't have to be the case; there's lots of opportunity to makes one's mark as *the* retailer for *your* particular product, especially if you can offer a lower price directly than Amazon can for the Kindle version.

Originally Posted by LeeH

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.

I know Baen does some of this, but personally I wouldn't want to buy an ARC. I want to see the final version. Would some people buy both copies? Sure, but on the other hand people might buy only the ARC and not like the quality despite all warnings to them not to expect anything polished.