Do some publishers have any idea?

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by meeera

You seem to have a have a weird, passive, unrealistic idea of how libraries and library users work. Libraries aren't magically sent a pile of random free books every month that readers then passively browse and borrow. A reasonable percentage of the library books I borrow are books I requested the library purchase. This means (a) a sale, (b) other people being exposed to the author and their works, and (c) the library knowing that that author/subgenre/style is something that at least some of their patrons want, guiding further purchases.

Exactly. I wasn't aware I explicitly had to elaborate that far. Maybe I can read between the lines and comprehend not just the literal words, but also the meaning meant.

[meeera]

I could put forward a case that a library patron who requests books be purchased, borrows them, puts reviews on Goodreads (etc), and enthuses about them on social media, is "carrying" an author far more than a person who buys their book on release day, reads it, then sits it on their shelf for the rest of their life.

But I don't think attempting to judge people in that way is useful or productive. Enjoy your reading. Spread the word to people who you think will enjoy it too. Pay your taxes. Advocate/vote in a way for your community that has the greatest potential to spread books and literacy and writing and creativity to all, not just to those who can afford a roomful of new hardbacks or giving up their day job to write fulltime (and I won't be any more specific or invite any more specificity than that, because this isn't P&R). Books and stories are for everyone.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by shalym

I bought a John D. MacDonald book published by Random House for $1.99 on sale last week. I've gotten many of those. I bought a Jefferson Bass book published by Harper Collins a few weeks ago for $1.99. I got a Heinlein book published by Penguin for $1.99 a month or so ago. These books are all backlist titles, but they're being sold by the publisher, not by the author.

Books from traditional publishers actually go on sale for $1.99-$2.99 often...I get notified of sales by many different means...sometimes from here, sometimes from other groups I belong to, and sometimes from eReader IQ.

Shari

To answer both of you at the same time, I did say books that are not indie or _backlist_, i.e. the books you are describing. Yes, I'm aware that many authors/publishers have their backlist books on sale.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by darryl

Thanks for correcting my speculation. What reasons do you believe some already successful Indie's have to go to tradpub? Is it pie in the sky optimism? Or are they doing non-standard deals? It is difficult to see why a successful Indie would sign an "Industry Standard" deal. It seems to me they would want higher royalty rates and a more restricted rights-grab than standard. Perhaps they match Amazon royalty rates on e-books? Of course we don't see the contracts either way, so can only speculate.

Well, not all tradpubs are predatory.
Some treat their authors fairly (BAEN is generally held up as a publisher with very good author relations) though they tend to be small and midsized publishers not "Ten thousand titles a year" monsters.

And, then, successful Indies come with established fanbases. No real work needs doing building the brand so their agents have the leverage to demand better terms than the "Industry Standard". Like guaranteed payola support. Or, like the big boys; big enough advances the royalty rate doesn't matter. (For a guy like Patterson, "selling" a manuscript is *selling* the manuscript. The upfront payment is bigger than most books make in 100 years of copyright. It only applies to maybe a dozen authors but for a big enough Indie... Andy Weir, for example, got the movie deal *before* the Tradpub deal: the movie tie-in justified big bucks. Tradpub loooves tie-ins. Again, no promotion required. Not even payola.)

It's doubtful they can match KOBO/KDP rates on ebooks but they *can* match the old APub Scout 50% rate. Most authors are willing to accept that though few publishers have shown interest in it. Main drivers would be print, audio (expensive up front) and library sales. Ebook sales would be a wash or lower, both because of higher prices.

The single biggest problem with Tradpub for established Indies isn't necessarily the money or even IP control but rather the pacing of releases and the scheduling; one release a year (occasionally two) and limited sales reporting every six months, a year to 18 months apart, is a far cry from KDP and Kobo daily monitoring and monthly reports and payments. It's not as life bills arrive twice a year, a year late.

Different strokes for different folks.
The key word is "established".
That generally requires a back catalog of 5-20 titles, depending on genre. Indies can do that in three-five years, even without instant success at launch. Few tradpub newcomers get there without a "black swan" which is why there are so few newly-established tradpub authors and so many one hit wonders, despite (or because) the lower sales needed to hit the list in this age of diluted reader spending and the eternal backlist. (Readers have more choices of older, known good, books and they exercise those choices.) If you check the financial reports and insider stories, backlist is the main driver of big trade publishing these days, making up over 50% of the net. Frontlist has been declining steadily since 2014 and most noticeably since 2016. (The election did it!)

You may have seen this, last week:

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/...f-of-2019.html

The reported growth was driven by folding in sales of previously independent publishers, and one-time political books, one-time deals, etc. Notably:

Acquisitions and hundreds of bestsellers drove the gains. Three acquisitions in particular affected first-half results, as detailed by PRH CEO Markus Dohle in a letter to worldwide employees: the purchases of children’s publisher Little Tiger Group in London as well as Spanish-language literary publisher Ediciones Salamandra and Catalan-language publisher La Campana Llibres, both of which are based in Barcelona. The company also acquired a 45% stake in Sourcebooks in late May.

Those folks are using every trick available to hide the ongoing industry-wide stasis and consolidation. It's not so much cluelessness driving tradpub pricing, consolidation, etc, as much as desperation. It's surviving in an age of stagnancy. Think "musical chairs", with one less seat each year.

https://publishingperspectives.com/2...consolidation/

Finally, the numbers of successful Indies going Tradpub aren't really all that big.

Certainly way lower than tradpub authors going Hybrid or full Indie.
But the establishment media doesn't report the latter as breathlessly as the former. Wouldn't do to highlight how tradpub authors supplement their declining (their words, not mine) tradpub revenues by doing Indie releases in between their slotted tradpub releases.

The transition continues and it hasn't yet stabilized into a viable balance between tradpub and Indie. It looks to be a generation wide change that won't settle down for another decade or two, when the last of the pre-2010 authors retire.

By then the business might indeed be randy Penguin on one side and a horde of Indies and small presses on the other side.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by darryl

Indeed. Sometimes the advance is all a tradpub author gets. In which case the incentive in you paying top price is pretty well non-existent. Of course, since books do not have to earn out to be profitable to a publisher you may help indirectly in a small way by enhancing the prospects of the author again being published in the future. So yes, the author does get some money from the book you buy, at least on paper. But not very much. It's value as a financial incentive to write more books is debatable in most cases.

Of course, at a 15% royalty rate as opposed to a 70% one, the tradpup paper author must sell 4.66 books to make the same amount as an Indie would on a single sale. This, of course, assumes the same price which is not usually correct. But what it does mean is that an indie e-book author selling a book for $3.22 will receive the same royalty as a tradpub paperback author selling a book for $15. So in fact Indie authors usually need to sell less books to make the same money. Though of course the lower price points for Indies are I suspect more promotional than profitable.

What I find interesting about the POD prices you quote is how close the prices are to tradpub books. The savings from the massive economies of scale achieved by a tradpub print run are obviously ending up in someone's pocket. And not the readers or the authors.

I haven't seen recent figures, but the last I did see paper sales were still much higher, with tradpub e-book sales static and Indie e-book sales rising. I think there will be a market for paper books for the foreseeable future. And Indies are not prominent in paper books, with book stores often refusing to stock either Indies or Amazon imprint books. I suspect this is why some Indie authors do take tradpub contracts. I suspect they are usually for print rights only and for higher royalty rates than standard. But for Indies the print market is largely untapped.

You last point first, yes, I've read authors say that because of the breakout of their sales (print, audio, ebook), they thought that going indie would simply be leaving money on the table. I suspect that the pros and cons of indie verse traditional publisher tends to vary from writer to writer.

As far as not paying the writer if he doesn't earn out, I think you are simply trying to play semantics games to make it sound like the author gets no benefit if I buy his book. I buy the book from a merchant and the purchase is eventually credited to the account of author. Advances are based on expected sales. Authors who don't earn out, either don't get new contracts or get lesser advances. A sale is a sale.

POD - print cost are really a small part of the actual price of a print book. Someone in the publishing business broke out the cost a while back in one of the threads that I read on this forum. If I recall correctly it came to perhaps a couple of dollars. I suspect that print cost of POD is a bit higher than that, but the equipment prices have really come down a lot. It's the same reason that many musicians have their own recording studio at home now. The prices have come down to a point that it's affordable.

If I recall correctly, Jim Baen mentioned a number of years ago that he, like most publishers sub contract out the actual printing and there are a handful of printing companies that handles most of the book printing. This was part of the explanation of why it took so long from when an author handed in the finished manuscript to when it was actually published. They had to schedule the print run some 6 months in advance. I suspect this hasn't changed all that much. Of course, boutique printing, i.e. custom printing a book and having it hand bound, is much, much more labor intensive and expensive. (A friend of mine's daughter working in such an operation in NYC as an intern one summer)

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by meeera

You seem to have a have a weird, passive, unrealistic idea of how libraries and library users work. Libraries aren't magically sent a pile of random free books every month that readers then passively browse and borrow. A reasonable percentage of the library books I borrow are books I requested the library purchase. This means (a) a sale, (b) other people being exposed to the author and their works, and (c) the library knowing that that author/subgenre/style is something that at least some of their patrons want, guiding further purchases.

No, I have a fairly rational view of where the money comes to buy the books. A public library buys books based on the money they are give by the government. You may put in requests for your local library to buy a book, you don't allocate how much to spend on books or decide which books are purchased. Depending on how big the library system is, books might be purchased at a central location rather than by individual librarians and your requests are at best added to a list of requested books which might or might not get purchased. Perhaps if you are in some small town library you might have some pull with which books that get purchased, but in the large library system, any individual library patron has very little influence on what books get purchased.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

No, I have a fairly rational view of where the money comes to buy the books. A public library buys books based on the money they are give by the government. You may put in requests for your local library to buy a book, you don't allocate how much to spend on books or decide which books are purchased. Depending on how big the library system is, books might be purchased at a central location rather than by individual librarians and your requests are at best added to a list of requested books which might or might not get purchased. Perhaps if you are in some small town library you might have some pull with which books that get purchased, but in the large library system, any individual library patron has very little influence on what books get purchased.

What makes you think you know better than I do how my Australian public library system works? Your hubris is out of control in this thread.

In my local system, for both paper books and ebooks, everyone who places a purchase request also has a book reserve placed in their name in the system, and the number of reserves is visible to logged-in library users when the book goes onto the Ordered list in the library catalogue. So I in fact have an extremely accurate idea of how many people also placed a purchase request for a book I have requested. It's usually 1; sometimes 2 or 3. The pbook library is not a small-town library, it's a standard suburban one; four B&M branches in one LGA, joined into a single book/catalogue pool. The ebook library is a State one.

Are you trying to change the goalposts to some hand-waving "total book spend" rather than "ways to support your favourite authors" now?

[ekbell]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

And how many of those $2 and $3 ebook sales are traditional publishers and how many are either indie or mid-tier authors selling their own books? I can't really say that I've seen very many (i.e. I don't recall seeing any) ebooks at that price that were not indie or backlist. I have seen first in a series sales like that (or for free) but usually that first in the series tends to be 10 or 20 years old (i.e. backlist)

While a fair number of such books are from smaller publishing houses, a casual look at my orders from the last six months shows that I have purchased sales books from such publishers as Penguin (Behave by Sapolsky, S is for Silence), Random House (The Cave and the Light by Herman, plus a couple of other history books), Simon & Shuster (Star Trek books, their newsletter frequently advertises sale normally of contemporary novels), HarperCollins (Agatha Christie books and Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia), and Bloomsbury (At the Edge of the World by Blanchard & Half Moon) plus, as you might expect, a number of backlist books from Open Media. And this does not include books published under a imprint belonging to a larger publishing house.

It's true that most of these books are not newly published but they are not consistently over a decade old either and a very few, such as Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson were actually put on sale shortly after publication (Release date was mid-march, I bought the book for $1.99 Can in June).

[shalym]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

To answer both of you at the same time, I did say books that are not indie or _backlist_, i.e. the books you are describing. Yes, I'm aware that many authors/publishers have their backlist books on sale.

Ok...I guess I read what you said as implying that you were talking about backlist from mid-tier authors who were selling their own books, or first in a series books that were backlist from traditional publishers...neither of which conditions apply to any of the books I mentioned.

Of course, most "indies" don't put brand new books on sale for $1.99-2.99 either, any more than the traditional publishers do. (Note that I am not counting the indie books that are regularly priced at those levels in that statement) When they do put new books on sale, it is more akin to what happens in book stores when they put new bestsellers on sale for 10-25% off. As I've said in other threads, I've *never* paid full list price for a hardcover book, not even when I bought the last 2 Harry Potter books on release day.

Shari

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by meeera

What makes you think you know better than I do how my Australian public library system works? Your hubris is out of control in this thread.

In my local system, for both paper books and ebooks, everyone who places a purchase request also has a book reserve placed in their name in the system, and the number of reserves is visible to logged-in library users when the book goes onto the Ordered list in the library catalogue. So I in fact have an extremely accurate idea of how many people also placed a purchase request for a book I have requested. It's usually 1; sometimes 2 or 3. The pbook library is not a small-town library, it's a standard suburban one; four B&M branches in one LGA, joined into a single book/catalogue pool. The ebook library is a State one.

Are you trying to change the goalposts to some hand-waving "total book spend" rather than "ways to support your favourite authors" now?

No, it means that I think I know better than you do how libraries and especially large public libraries work in the United States. I've actually worked in public libraries in the US. That's how they work. What is it with Australians thinking they know how things work in the US? I thought it was the ugly Americans who had the reputation of assuming everything worked just like home all over the world.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by shalym

Ok...I guess I read what you said as implying that you were talking about backlist from mid-tier authors who were selling their own books, or first in a series books that were backlist from traditional publishers...neither of which conditions apply to any of the books I mentioned.

Of course, most "indies" don't put brand new books on sale for $1.99-2.99 either, any more than the traditional publishers do. (Note that I am not counting the indie books that are regularly priced at those levels in that statement) When they do put new books on sale, it is more akin to what happens in book stores when they put new bestsellers on sale for 10-25% off. As I've said in other threads, I've *never* paid full list price for a hardcover book, not even when I bought the last 2 Harry Potter books on release day.

Shari

I think it's pretty rare for anyone to pay list price for hardcover fiction books. I've seen some non fiction that weren't discounted from the list price.

Certainly, established indies with a fanbase don't put their new books on sale for one or two bucks. Five bucks seems to the normal price at the moment. At least most of the indie authors that I read price their new books at that price point.

[leebase]

I think some of us are missing the forest for the trees. From my perspective anyway. Buy a hard back, borrow a friends book. Fine. Just keep in mind that this isn't milk and butter and bread. Spend a LITTLE of your mind space on "am I supporting the art" or am I just being cheap.

Am I borrowing a book from the library because "I paid taxes" or is it really just a free way to read a book. And MAYBE....since you like Mary McBook Writer's stories that you buy your own copy to help keep Mary in the business of writing books. Or perhaps you think Alan Indie Author writing in his spare time is worthy of your purchase so that he can leave his day job and write full time.

Some of you seem to get this. When it comes to "not buying a book from the Big 5 because you don't like xyz business practice"....that's the SAME THING. It's understanding that you are not just reading, you are voting with your wallet.

Vote with your MONEY....support your authors.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by leebase

I think some of us are missing the forest for the trees. From my perspective anyway. Buy a hard back, borrow a friends book. Fine. Just keep in mind that this isn't milk and butter and bread. Spend a LITTLE of your mind space on "am I supporting the art" or am I just being cheap.

Am I borrowing a book from the library because "I paid taxes" or is it really just a free way to read a book. And MAYBE....since you like Mary McBook Writer's stories that you buy your own copy to help keep Mary in the business of writing books. Or perhaps you think Alan Indie Author writing in his spare time is worthy of your purchase so that he can leave his day job and write full time.

Some of you seem to get this. When it comes to "not buying a book from the Big 5 because you don't like xyz business practice"....that's the SAME THING. It's understanding that you are not just reading, you are voting with your wallet.

Vote with your MONEY....support your authors.

There's a lot you say that I don't agree with. But I never understood why your original post caught fire the way it did. It seemed to require willful misinterpretation.

I get emails from Bookbub and those $1.99 books get me to sample a lot of authors I otherwise wouldn't try. There's also a lot of authors I enjoy well enough, but they aren't favorites and I get their books on sale.

But then there's writers like Stephen King who's work I enjoy tremendously. He's entertained me for years and I'm glad he's still writing. I've already pre-ordered The Institute for $14.99. I understand at this point Stephen King doesn't need my money. But he got to where he was because so many people bought his books when they were new, rather than waiting for them to appear at the remainder table.

Then there's Dennis L. McKiernan. I've been surprised his most famous book, The Iron Tower wasn't available as an ebook. Finally, after years of waiting it was released a month ago. Once I saw it was out, I bought the book at asking price rather than waiting for the price to drop. Because I wanted to support him.

No, you aren't obligated to buy every book you read at full MSRP. You aren't even obligated to buy every book you read. You aren't a monster for borrowing from a library. But if there's a writer that you consider a favorite, particularly if that writer is a midlister who likely doesn't support themselves purely by their writing income, buy their books. Tell them that their hard work is worth more than $0.99 to you.

Why is that controversial?

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Why is that controversial?

It isn't.
When it's voluntary.

When choosing not to do it comes with adjectives or it's set up as a virtuosity test there will be pushback, though. Or when it's set up as a virtuosity test.
Not everybody can afford to (or chooses to) feed their reading addiction at full price.

Different strokes for different folks.
Do as you please but don't present it as a standard. Others have different opinions.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Tell them that their hard work is worth more than $0.99 to you.

Why is that controversial?

Very few books I buy cost as little as 1-2 bucks. Some indies are $2.99, but most of my purchases fall between 4-9 dollars/euros (depending on where I buy them). Nevertheless, because I'm not willing to pay more than 10 € for any ebook, I got the label "skinflint" along with many other posters here. Yeah, that's insulting.