[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by LeeH

[SNIP lots of good stuff addressing comments from others]

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

Say Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! Another publisher has seen the light!!

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.

If you make a clean ePub, it should be no problem to produce quality LRF (e.g. Sony Reader) output from it as well.

Originally Posted by LeeH

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.

Actually, I'm not suggesting eBooks as an afterthought at all! Rather, if you build your workflow correctly the eBook should pop out with little-to-no human intervention. This really isn't rocket science -- we've been doing it over in the software world since the early 80s (for manuals and marketing material) using old-school tools like Scribe and TeX. All you need is to start with both clean text and semantic markup of the structure (that is, identification of sections, ToC, emphasis, footnotes, headers, captions, and the like).

I've rarely seen a work of fiction that requires more complicated layout than what we've been doing for over 25 years in the Tech world (there are certainly some exceptions, but this is broadly true). So I have a very hard time believing that a reasonable publishing work-flow can't handle automatic production of (for example) ePub, html and Mobipocket eBooks starting from clean input. Lots of folks from the fiction publishing world tell me that standard practice doesn't support this -- which just leaves me wondering why they tolerate a broken workflow in the first place! Unless you're doing really crazy things with layout it just isn't (or needn't be) rocket science to automate this stuff.

But I digress.

If your typesetting folks are seriously sweating issues like kerning, widow-and-orphan-control and other typographic stuff that really does lead to a better-looking book... that's great! More power to you (and them)! But it has no impact on the eBooks. After all, the various eBook formats and viewers don't support any of those features anyway!

Of course the eBook shares the fixed costs -- and must pay for its pro rata share of them, too! But the eBook also brings in additional sales at the margin (you really don't lose a paper sale for each eSale), so you'll be spreading those fixed costs over are larger number of sales.

Originally Posted by LeeH

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.

What percentages are you expecting? I don't expect you to tell US that, but rather want to get you thinking. Baen's doing ~20% of all sales through their web-site -- and growth there is outpacing paper sales by a lot. Do you really expect the total of all the other eBook outlets to exceed that number? If not, I strongly suggest that you consider cutting out the other layers of the market, and split the savings with your authors and customers. Disintermediation is one of the great benefits of the Internet.

Originally Posted by LeeH

I'm not going to comment on the rights issue, [...]

And I don't really expect you to, but I do want you (collectively) to think about it. I brought it up because it's relevant from several different points of view, to wit:

• Universal rights means that anyone in the world can buy the book with no issues of "you don't live in the right country, so you can't buy from us." The Internet is, after all, a global phenomenon! Message traffic here at Mobileread shows that would-be eBook buyers are baffled (and furious!) when told they can't buy an eBook because they don't live in the right place.
• Non-exclusive rights is how Baen avoids issues of competing on price with their retailers. Baen doesn't sell eBooks to Fictionwise or Amazon or Sony. Baen sells eBooks to the public! When one of their books shows up at Fictionwise (for example) it's there because the author's agent cut a separate deal with FW. Many of Baen's authors have reported that their eBook sales through Baen are several (even many) times higher than the grand total of all other electronic outlets combined. We've not yet seen the impact of the Kindle. But little tiny Baen absolutely trounced Sony's store in terms of sales of the (not many) books available in both places.
• Non-exclusive rights is an expression of Baen's confidence in their business model for electronic sales. All evidence to date suggests that it's worked stunningly well for them. I see no reason why it couldn't work stunningly well for you.

Those first two issues -- and especially the relative sales numbers! -- constitute good reason to consider running your own store

Originally Posted by LeeH

but in terms of bundling books - that's something we're certainly hoping to address once we have a bit more of a backlist.

Bundles aren't just a matter for the backlist. Baen bundles the frontlist! Their typical output is between 4 and 8 new books each month. They sell monthly bundles of all N books for $15; these bundles remain available more-or-less forever. They also do temporary bundles of single-author or single-series electronic re-issues. These latter bundles provide a temporary discount to kick off sales; the bundle discount ends a few months after release.

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.

They started selling eARCs when David Weber mentioned that he'd turned in a new book, and then (several months later) folks saw an ARC sell for... $200 (?? more??? I can't remember) on eBay. They grumbled to Jim Baen, and Jim saw a profit opportunity. The eARCs are clearly labelled as raw uncut, unfiltered, not yet proofed or copy-edited, not-necessarily final on all plot points, etc. But even with all that, what they are is early. Often 3 to 6 months before publication. And some fans will pay for that. Enough that Baen and their authors are happy to continue.

Originally Posted by LeeH

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.
[SNIP the rest of the message]

Once again, welcome to MobileRead! And good for you (and Angry Robot Books) for soliciting opinions and advice from your customers.

Xenophon