Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
But you don't carry it out, sir. This is for one year's earnings. The cost to convert to an e-book is a one-time only charge. Therefore it should be amortized over the entire sales of the e-book, for the entire length of the e-book copyright. Or look at it another way, it costs X dollars in time, labor, or money (for somebody else) to convert the book to an e-book. Like a publisher's advance, the writer needs to "earn out" that cost, then the rest becomes his profit thereafter.
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I didn't carry it out explicitly, but in most businesses, a one or two year payback time is very generous. In publishing, with common book press runs of only 10-50,000 books and returns of over 50%, what happens next year is likely irrelevant, unless your name is Nora Roberts or Steven King. Most books never earn out. Most also disappear from shelves within a year.
One of the small, but real benefits of ebooks to both authors and publishers is the ability to keep backlist books "in print" for an indefinite period of time without running afoul of the "Thor Power Tools" inventory ruling. It means you might be able to _buy_ the ebook of that obscure third volume of the not-very-well-selling series Joe Midlist wrote in 1993 instead of scouring used book stores for it.
Regards,
Jack Tingle