Quote:
Originally Posted by Xenophon
I strongly disagree with you! The folks and Baen & Webscriptions are doing just fine selling eBooks for $6 (less in bundles). They've done it via disintermediation (a.k.a cutting out the middle-men). And their books go on sale at $6 2 weeks before the hardcover comes out (with its $27-ish cover price).
Now if you said that price cuts that large won't be possible without changing the overall structure of marketing and distribution, I'd agree with that in a heart-beat!
Xenophon
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Baen's market strategy is based on getting the customer hooked on multiple series of books, and this allows them to offer mass-market pricing on ebooks (their ebooks sell at a 25% discount to their paperbacks) when the retailer is cut out of the picture.
Sure, you can get one ebook for $6, but wouldn't it be better to get 4 for $15 in a Webscription bundle, and start reading the ebook you're interested in even sooner?
Sounds like a deal!
Of course, you've now paid 2 1/2 times as much and got 3 other books that you probably weren't planning to read, though you will now since you've bought them. And if you like one of those books, you'll probably buy the others in the series, etc. etc. And maybe you'd like to buy an unproofed ARC at $15 to get the very latest instalment? And so it snowballs...
Baen has a finely-tuned business model that works very well for Genre fiction which is specifically targeted, but you need to look at their overall strategy. That model can't be simply transferred to a general publisher. In many cases it could, to be sure - houses that pump out endless streams of James Pattersons, John Grishams and similar Genre stuff could still make profit with the Baen model, but the fact that these books currently take in handsome profits at the top of the hardback bestseller lists makes it unlikely they'll take the chance.
Any publisher that wants to emulate Baen's success needs to make sure that they have all the elements in place so that the upsell works.