[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by Barcey

My argument was that the author's effort and risk is exactly the same between a physical book and an ebook and their compensation should not change. You've said nothing to refute this.

Nor am I trying to. In case you missed it, I was largely correcting your assertion that "authors get a raw deal," and at no point did I suggest authors should get less than their current royalty rates or smaller advances.

Originally Posted by Barcey

On average I would guess that a typical author spends 6 months to 2 years of effort to write a book. The majority of them do this for no guarantee of income and make nothing. That's the largest financial risk they can make. They are forced into signing bad contracts because they're already risk vested.

I concur that most authors are investing significant time and energy into their projects.

That does not change the fact that there is a tremendous number of people with the exact same goal of getting published, that the supply of new titles overwhelms the demand, that no one knows what books will sell, and that authors are consuming, not supplying, the financial resources involved in publishing the book.

Originally Posted by Barcey

I'm tired of hearing about the enormous risks that publishers make. It's their job. The personal risk that an author is taking is huge compared to the risk the publisher is taking to their company.

As in, you're tired of hearing facts that don't support your position?

I concur though that they willfully accept the risks involved in publishing a book. But it's also an author's choice to write, and more importantly, an author's choice to sign a contract. Not to mention any author with half a brain is going to have an agent and a lawyer reviewing the contracts. There is no force, no duress, only consent.

By the way, it also gets somewhat tiresome to hear people proclaim that publishers are greedy fiends who foist miserable contracts onto poverty-stricken writers, and assuming that all publishers do is just rake in money with no effort.

Originally Posted by Barcey

Dan Brown sold 100,000 ebooks in a market that everyone keeps saying is insignificant compared to physical books. At $9.99 that's $1 million which is enough for producing a quality product. It's very easy math for publishers to pick authors that they are confident will sell enough copies to recover costs.

You're joking, right?

I'd be stunned if Dan Brown's advance for The Lost Symbol was less than $4 million. Not to mention that if Amazon had gotten their way, the publishers would've collected $5-7 per book, thus losing anywhere from 25-50% of the revenues.

And no, it's not "easy math" to "pick the winners." Knowing what will and won't sell is excruciatingly difficult, and a couple of big-budget duds can trash the publisher's bottom line. Audiences are fickle; there is absolutely no way to know which novice writers will sell, let alone which experienced writers will sell, let alone which authors can crank out blockbuster after blockbuster. That's why a publisher can make a huge profit off of a Dan Brown book, but at the end of the day still have a 10-15% profit margin on their operations.

And let's not forget, those blockbuster authors get their multi-million dollar advances months, if not years, before their new books hits the stores. That's quite a chunk of change to fork over before you've made dollar one on a book.

Originally Posted by Barcey

1) I wasn't talking about the agency model.
2) According to another post in this thread you're saying the same thing. The retailer pays 50%. Are you incorrect?

No, you're just not paying attention.

Under the current arrangement, a retailer essentially buys the books from the publisher or distributor, and resells it to the public at whatever price they want. Typically the retailer is 50% of the cover price, though discounts may apply.

In an agency model (which is what I was discussing in that section) -- and by the way is how Apple will sell its ebooks, and is soon how Amazon will sell at least some ebooks -- the retailer is acting more as an "agent" for the publisher, and in that situation the retailer only gets 30%. They do not pay up front for the books, so the retailer takes less risk, and thus gets paid less.