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Old 08-07-2009, 11:24 AM   #13
Xenophon
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant View Post
Baen haven't entirely cut out the middle man. Arnold Bailey who runs webscriptions isn't a staff member of Baen, but his own boss.

So I'm sure Baen pay a cut to the retailer, Arnold, but I'm sure it's a lot less than the 65% that Amazon take from small publishers!
This is true. But Arnold also takes on more of the expenses for the e-Publishing than do Amazon or Fictionwise or... Specifically, he bears the full cost of converting from whatever format the publisher provides.* And the cost of scan-and-proof work on old titles. And a variety of other things that were not specified in the posts I recall from Baen's Bar. In this sense, he's more like a corporate partner than like a distributor.

*He can influence the format, but doesn't control it. And he does a good deal more prep-work than the other e-Book places. All of this is because Webscriptions got started under the "no new work for Jim" (Baen, that is) approach. That means it's a little hard to disentangle the distributor part of the picture from the e-publishing partner part.

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