Simon & Schuster is delaying ebooks by four months

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by charleski

They're cheaper to the extent that a 20-30% discount on the physical price would be reasonable. Anything more is sheer fantasy.

Tim Hutchinson (the CEO of Hodder Headline) did a breakdown of costs in 1998. It was:
Booksellers' share: 55%
Manufacturing costs: 15%
Overheads: 9%
Marketing (including some distribution cost): 8%
Royalties: 8%
Publisher's profit: 5%

The idea that an ebook should be half the price is just wishful thinking.

I strongly disagree with you! The folks and Baen & Webscriptions are doing just fine selling eBooks for $6 (less in bundles). They've done it via disintermediation (a.k.a cutting out the middle-men). And their books go on sale at $6 2 weeks before the hardcover comes out (with its $27-ish cover price).

Now if you said that price cuts that large won't be possible without changing the overall structure of marketing and distribution, I'd agree with that in a heart-beat!

Xenophon

[amjbrown]

I've never heard of any of the authors on Baen though. They are not exactly Martin Amis or Dan Brown (depending upon your taste!). I doubt they see the earnings of the type of writers that the publishers are so keen to hang onto.

I agree with the maths behind the 20-30% discount being feasible.

And the idea of adverts as per the newest thread in this arena makes me shudder

IMHO

amjb

[Krystian Galaj]

Originally Posted by amjbrown

I've never heard of any of the authors on Baen though. They are not exactly Martin Amis or Dan Brown (depending upon your taste!). I doubt they see the earnings of the type of writers that the publishers are so keen to hang onto.

Apparently you don't read SF.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by amjbrown

I've never heard of any of the authors on Baen though. They are not exactly Martin Amis or Dan Brown (depending upon your taste!). I doubt they see the earnings of the type of writers that the publishers are so keen to hang onto.

I agree with the maths behind the 20-30% discount being feasible.

And the idea of adverts as per the newest thread in this arena makes me shudder

IMHO

amjb

You've never watched a single episode of the original Star Trek series? Or the Star Trek movies? 'Cause, if you have, you've heard of James Doohan. And what about Robert Heinlein or Jerry Pournelle? I don't believe you.

Derek

[amjbrown]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

You've never watched a single episode of the original Star Trek series? Or the Star Trek movies? 'Cause, if you have, you've heard of James Doohan. And what about Robert Heinlein or Jerry Pournelle? I don't believe you.

Derek

I thought Gene Roddenberry (sp??) was Mr Star Trek. But I concede Robert Heinlein - he's very good indeed

[amjbrown]

Originally Posted by Krystian Galaj

Apparently you don't read SF.

Issac Asimov, Iain M Banks and Frank Herbert have pretty much exclusive rights on the SF books I have read in my life.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by amjbrown

Issac Asimov, Iain M Banks and Frank Herbert have pretty much exclusive rights on the SF books I have read in my life.

You need to get theeself to the Baen library because you have much good reading ahead of you.

Sci/fi: Give Eric Flint and Mark Van Name a try.

Fantasy: Mercedes Lackey for starters. Many books, many types of stories.

Ellen Guon --another favorite. Holly Lisle also has some good fantasy with Baen...

Baen has an entire library of ebooks that are free to try and we are talking books of the highest caliber.

[charleski]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Great, 20-30% off the paperback price is a fine price from my perspective.

(If they start it 20-30% cheaper than hardback and ramp the price down over the six months it takes to get to the paperback? Well, that's reasonable as well. But very few companies want to take advantage of the flexible pricing afforded by the internet!)

Yes, that's exactly what I mean, ebook pricing should drop once the premium window has passed. Once the paperback is out, the ebook should be offered at a discount to that price (and this discount should be reflected in the MRP - if the retailer wants to advertise a discount to generate sales, then that comes out of their cut). This largely relies on retailers updating their prices properly, and some just aren't that good at it, we've all seen examples of ebooks costing twice the paperback price.

[DawnFalcon]

Bear -

Heck, there's a bunch of compilations of classic scifi as well. Anvil, Laumer, Lenister, Godwin and Schmitz - all free library ebooks.

It's not all milscifi by any means, that's just Baen's most visible product (that's only part of the free selection...).


charleski - It's pretty amazing how closely the Book industry is repeating the mistakes of the Games industry, down to the fixed chunk taken by the publisher/platform holder.

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by amjbrown

I've never heard of any of the authors on Baen though. They are not exactly Martin Amis or Dan Brown (depending upon your taste!).

No problem about never having heard of them, especially if you're not widely read in SF and/or Fantasy. But quite a few of them routinely hit the NYT hardcover fiction bestsellers list.

I doubt they see the earnings of the type of writers that the publishers are so keen to hang onto.

[SNIP]

amjb

They certainly don't hit Dan Brown or Stephen King sized earnings. But it's not unusual to see, for example, a Baen hardcover with a bound-in CD of eBooks where the CD is included "in the first 100,000 copies only." And when that first printing of 100K copies sells out in the first couple of weeks, later printings (often multiple such) indeed come w/o the CD.

Most publishers would be eager to hang on to any author who hits the NYT bestsellers list, even the extended list that's not printed in the paper -- it holds numbers 16-30 IIRC and is reported to the bookselling trade, but not to the general public.

Xenophon

[DawnFalcon]

Actually 16-30 is available online pretty freely

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by amjbrown

I thought Gene Roddenberry (sp??) was Mr Star Trek. But I concede Robert Heinlein - he's very good indeed

Which is why I said you've never watched any of them. James Doohan? You probably (had you watched the episodes) would have known him better as "Scotty".

Derek

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Actually 16-30 is available online pretty freely

Heck, the contents of the bound-in CDs are available online - free! With permission of Baen Books, I might add. There is absolutely NO reason to not have a large number of Baen books in ebook format.



Derek

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Actually 16-30 is available online pretty freely

Certainly. It's not a secret, It's just not printed in the NYT paper listing, or in most of the many other papers that license that listing.

Xenophon

[charleski]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

I strongly disagree with you! The folks and Baen & Webscriptions are doing just fine selling eBooks for $6 (less in bundles). They've done it via disintermediation (a.k.a cutting out the middle-men). And their books go on sale at $6 2 weeks before the hardcover comes out (with its $27-ish cover price).

Now if you said that price cuts that large won't be possible without changing the overall structure of marketing and distribution, I'd agree with that in a heart-beat!

Xenophon

Baen's market strategy is based on getting the customer hooked on multiple series of books, and this allows them to offer mass-market pricing on ebooks (their ebooks sell at a 25% discount to their paperbacks) when the retailer is cut out of the picture.

Sure, you can get one ebook for $6, but wouldn't it be better to get 4 for $15 in a Webscription bundle, and start reading the ebook you're interested in even sooner? Sounds like a deal!

Of course, you've now paid 2 1/2 times as much and got 3 other books that you probably weren't planning to read, though you will now since you've bought them. And if you like one of those books, you'll probably buy the others in the series, etc. etc. And maybe you'd like to buy an unproofed ARC at $15 to get the very latest instalment? And so it snowballs...

Baen has a finely-tuned business model that works very well for Genre fiction which is specifically targeted, but you need to look at their overall strategy. That model can't be simply transferred to a general publisher. In many cases it could, to be sure - houses that pump out endless streams of James Pattersons, John Grishams and similar Genre stuff could still make profit with the Baen model, but the fact that these books currently take in handsome profits at the top of the hardback bestseller lists makes it unlikely they'll take the chance.

Any publisher that wants to emulate Baen's success needs to make sure that they have all the elements in place so that the upsell works.