Le Guin at National Book Awards

[BenG]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The best way to get back at her for this atrocity is to not buy her books.

What atrocity? That she has an opinion?

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by BenG

What atrocity? That she has an opinion?

That she uses her reputation and the soapbox her standing in some circles provides her to propagate known lies she has already been called on. This... annoys... some people and diminishes their opinion of her.

The effect is similar to the boycotting of Orson Scott Card's books because of *him* expressing his opinions.

In both cases people are voting their wallets, choosing to deny their financial support to people they find unsavory.

(Shrug)

As the SCOTUS has repeatedly held, how money is spent is a form of speech. Writers have their ways of expressing their opinions and buyers have theirs. Both equally protected under the law. It is not a one way street.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by murg

This isn't about Amazon pressuring the publisher.



My understanding is that the $9.99 price primarily is for fiction.

And Amazon understands that you will sell proportionally more at a lower price, so that the revenue to the publisher, and thence to the author is increased.

Economic theory discusses the concept of price elasticity in great detail. For some items, you sell the same number of items, no matter how high or low you set the price. Normally, there is a range where you can sell the item without effecting the number sold. Quite a few companies make a ton of money by selling premium priced items rather than commodity priced items.

Commodity prices hurt name authors. Their fans will buy the books at the current price structures and it's a heck of a lot better to sell 10,000 books at $27 a pop than it is at $1.50 a pop. Unknown authors do better at commodity prices because people are more willing to buy an unknown author at $1.50 than they are at even $10.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by BenG

What atrocity? That she has an opinion?

No, the atrocity is that she has an opinion that disagrees with the strongly held opinion of some. For some people, it appears that anyone who disagrees with their strongly held opinions are evil and must be vilified at every opportunity. That seems to be more and more common on the internet these days.

[BenG]

Like I said, she has an opin ion and we have our on opinions. I may disagree with her but I don't see any reason to get worked up about it.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by murg

Has anyone seen the remainder table at B&N recently? These prices may not be that far off those for pBooks.

And they are in line with used book prices, especially older books.

Remainder books are failed books getting a last chance to move before getting sent back to the publisher for pulping. As a rule, remainders generate zero or next to zero income to authors under deep-discount clauses in contracts, unlike similarly priced ebooks.

Remainders are a side effect of the "produce model" of distribution that traditional publishing developed for B&M distribution.

From THE BUSINESS RUSCH blog:

http://kriswrites.com/2011/04/06/the....YcYqOUt4.dpbs

Traditional publishing only has six months in order to sell a book. That book has to earn back a publisher’s mid-six-figure investment in half a year. Most publishers would prefer to earn back that investment in the first month, and then realize a profit on the book after that. This goes for every book published traditionally from bestsellers to the midlist book to the bottom of the list. (If you don’t understand lists, see this post of mine from the publishing series.

Every traditionally published book has to earn back its investment within six months or be considered a failure.

I’ve used this example before, but it’s instructive: Traditional publishers would rather have a book that sells 100,000 copies in its first month and then sells no more copies than a book that sells 15,000 copies per month for one year. Why? Because the second book will not earn back its investment by the six-month window even though that book will outsell the other book in the course of a year. (And the second book will probably continue selling for years—except the traditional publisher might just take it out of print because of its “poor performance.”)

Tradpub books at B&M are managed exactly like produce at an organic food supermarket. Priced high early, dropped in price dramatically as its selling life nears its end, and then disposed of to make room for fresher produce. With organic veggies the sale window is about a week or so, with pbooks it is three months, typically. And just as with veggies, if a supplier's produce proves a slightly slow mover, the supplier gets dropped to make room for somebody else's organic output, hoping it proves more popular.

The retail term that applies is "velocity"; it is a measure of the profitability of a book based on the time it spends on sale, taking up fixed-cost shelf space. Bestseller fad titles are preferred because they sell a lot in a short time and nobody even asks for them once the fad is over. Kinda like pet rocks.

Bookselling has been that way since the Great Depression of the 1930's (not to be confused with the current, endless "Great Recession") when book return policies were first instituted and along with front table payola returns is what keeps most B&M bookstores afloat.

Amazon and the other online retailers of both pbooks and ebooks do not suffer the limitations of shelf space that requires the produce model and so they treat books like what they really are, dry goods. Unperishable merchandise thaf can be stocked indefinitely and generates revenue years and decades after release.

Which a lot of old-timey authors and publishers don't quite understand because their entire mindset was formed in an age of scarcity of shelf space totally unlike the age of on-demand abundance we live in.

See this:
http://kriswrites.com/2012/03/14/the....nHSutGE6.dpbs

And this:

http://kriswrites.com/2014/04/16/the....azxgH3Ak.dpbs

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by BenG

Like I said, she has an opin ion and we have our on opinions. I may disagree with her but I don't see any reason to get worked up about it.

Some people do get worked up.

http://xkcd.com/386/

And some people choose not to give their money to people they disagree with.
Card is one. LeGuin is apparently now another.

[khalleron]

Eh, I just disagree with her. I don't think she's actually doing evil, as Card is. I'll still buy her books if she writes one I think might be interesting.

[Nabeel]

I like her. This is a brave speech: she is able to speak out where a lot of people would feel too scared. She's right about so many things.

Culture and the market have always had a difficult existence together, but it's got more difficult in the last few years.

[JSWolf]

Given a chance, the BPHs would try to price eBooks out of range of a lot of people. The authors just don't get this. The problem is that the authors are backing the publishers and agency when they should be backing their readers. Without their readers, the authors would not be making any money.

[BenG]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Some people do get worked up.

http://xkcd.com/386/

And some people choose not to give their money to people they disagree with.
Card is one. LeGuin is apparently now another.

Like they were planning on buying Le Guin's books to begin with.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

And some people choose not to give their money to people they disagree with.

Since I disagree with almost everyone on something, this would create a problem for me.

[Barcey]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The best way to get back at her for this atrocity is to not buy her books.

Well since she doesn't want books to be treated as mere commodities you would presumably make her very happy. Authors are artists and need to be sheltered from the filthy commercial side of it. People just need to throw money in their bank accounts and let the art flow.

At least she didn't just criticize Amazon, she also complained about the publishers business practices.

[varlog]

Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

I think that's what really bothers her. Not being an author I don't know the precise circumstances of course, how much force is applied , but I've met those energetic corporate women/men who know what is profitable without being really involved, not caring a damn about anything beside... statistics? carrier?. I don't think they do, in the long run, the good job, too.
I like Ursula K. le Guin as an author. If somebody was telling her how/what/when to write - my compliments! I don't think it could have been a corporate executive, as I know them.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by varlog

I think that's what really bothers her. Not being an author I don't know the precise circumstances of course, how much force is applied ,
.

Plenty of anecdotal reports to be found.
Like this one:

http://www.thepassivevoice.com/11/20...comment-269132

A writer friend of mine sends me her final drafts to beta-read. Always a treat! She has an amazing YA voice. Anyhow, she wrote a YA book that took on an old urban legend. It was great. She got an agent and a publisher and there was a bidding war. And then, after all of that. the winning publisher made her rewrite the entire book. Of the 90,000 or so words, they had her change about 85,000, excising all of the backstory and making it the perfect book to launch a movie. Yes, they got the movie rights. This is a publisher that has decided to only do books for movie tie-in. They took her magnificent idea and thought, this would be a great teen horror flick, and had her basically write the script in book form.

Honestly, it’s not good anymore. They couldn’t hide her brilliance, that shines through, but the plot was homogenized to require less thought on the part of the reader. They no longer allowed her to humanize the villain and that broke my heart.

Problem is, none of the incidents involve Amazon at all because they are just a retailer. And one infamous for stocking practically anything.

Publishers work off the Golden Rule: "Them's with the gold make the rules."

You take their money, you dance their tune.
But LeGuin wants it both ways; their money, her tune.
That might work in Norway but not in Manhattan.