Quote:
Originally Posted by griffonwing
With so many format programs, how hard would it be for an author to have his copy sent to a proofer, once it come back with a green light, to go ahead and convert his text to the different formats himself.
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1. If you're in my position, impossible for contractual reasons -- I don't own the ebook rights to my works (until they fall out of print and I serve a reversion letter on the publisher: happily, everything remains in print). They buy ebook rights -- this is a deal-breaker: no ebook rights, no sale -- and then they farm them out to someone else. I am simply not in the loop on the deal; I don't even get told when ebook rights are sold, or where, other than as a footnote to a royalty statement six months down the line.
2. Even if I own the rights to a book that's reverted ... back when I worked in technical publishing, we reckoned you could properly proofread about fifty pages per day, or one page per ten minutes. To do a 400 page novel, you're talking about eight days of billable time. Assuming you outsource to a sweatshop at $10/hour, that's about $800 in proofing costs. More realistically, think $2000-3000.
... Which is all very well, except that the hard truth is that ebook sales
suck. Even Baen, who are Doing It Right, expect to sell about as many ebook copies of a novel as hardcovers -- and that's a
new title. Reprints never sell as well as originals -- in fact, they typically sell 20-25% of the original print run. We're talking about 500-1500 sales, total. Where is the $2000-3000 for proofreading going to come from?
Writing -- and publishing -- is a business. A bit more awareness of this (or a little less sense of entitlement on the part of the consumers) would be welcome. KTHX BYE.
(Signed: Grumpy.)
Addendum Sorry about the grump. I read the preceding comments in annoying whine: "why don't the big bad authors wave their magic wands and make everything right?" To which the answer is: give us a magic wand and we'll wave it! And everyone can have a pony. Until then, it's hard work for little reward.
On the other hand, I'm hedging my bets against the rights reversion time, by making damned sure I have (and keep) archive quality copies of the final typeset text of my books (I reckon I am probably within the law to buy ebook copies, dumped to epub from the original Quark files, and crack the DRM if I am the copyright holder
) so that if I ever have to re-sell and go back to press I can at least avoid the OCR/eyeball step.