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Originally Posted by charleski
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!
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Yup. But note that it's usually 6-8 books for $15, with a guarantee that at least 4 have never before been available in bits.
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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...
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Don't forget the Free Library, and the bound-in-the-book CDs, and many other promotions. And yes, it works quite well. Certainly their fans often jokingly describe them as a "pusher of book-crack" rather than a publisher. "Want to try some fiction, kid? First book's free..."
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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.
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More broadly speaking, it could work IMHO for any publisher with a house (or label, or line, or whatever they call it) that produces a stream of identifiable style that is likely to appeal to folks who've bought from them before. This need not be "genre stuff" -- it could equally well be biographies, history, current-affairs, or whatever. The key is a commonality of interest with an audience that buys at least semi-regularly.
I agree that Baen's approach is unlikely to work for all of the books published by all the big publishers. But I suspect that it could be used quite successfully across a broader spectrum of books than most people would expect. And I'm rather distressed that Big Publishing, Inc. seems bound and determined to ignore their demonstrated success. Is it just too different from their current assumptions?
Xenophon