Quote:
Originally Posted by Xenophon
Jeffrey:
Can you say anything about the magnitude of your e-Sales? When authors are willing to share actual royalty info, it helps eBook enthusiasts to make a stronger case for DRM-free and region-restriction-free ebooks. Any hard info you can share would be most welcome.
Xenophon
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Only in general terms. I don't think the people I work with would appreciate my putting up numbers that are considered private between me and them. Nor would those numbers be even remotely impressive in the context you're talking about. They're still a drop in the bucket compared to even mediocre paper book sales.
No, what was so encouraging to me was seeing books that previously had been selling on the order of 1-3 copies per quarter suddenly going into (low) triple digits. And the new books following suit. And knowing that they're on the market for as long as I want and won't quickly drop out of print or vanish from shelves.
I say "suddenly," but that's not quite accurate. It turns out that royalty reporting is almost as slow with ebooks as it is with paper books. The retailers have something like 3-6 months to pay the publisher, and then the publisher reports quarterly, so that by the time numbers come to the author, there's almost no way to tell what time period those numbers actually represent. I'm guessing I just saw numbers relative to last spring, but not summer. I haven't seen any accounting yet for books sold on webscription, for example, and those went on sale in June. You'd think a sale that's completed with a click of a mouse would then be reported almost immediately. You'd be wrong, I'm afraid.
I think what will carry weight with the DRM-free cause is increased sales in general, and the authors and publishers of the DRM-free editions pointing out that they're doing as well as the others.
The region-restrictions probably have more to do with the original book contracts specifying rights in particular countries than anything else. It's frustrating, but where the original publisher controls ebook rights, it's going to be slow to change.