Amazon's $9.99 eBook Attacked as "Predatory Pricing"

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by rhadin

Why are my rates relevant to the discussion? And what full disclosure do I have to make?

As I thought, you're defending your business model. Nothing wrong with that, but it does very much colour everything you post, and personally I'm going to dismiss your costings on that basis - games are highly specialised, and the costs are still not nothing like the ones you claim.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by tompe

But I still have no idea if you are talking about 10 or 100 or 1000 hours of work. And I asked about your $50000 example. What was the title of the book?

Well if you think it will help, the total number of hours were 491.25.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

As I thought, you're defending your business model. Nothing wrong with that, but it does very much colour everything you post, and personally I'm going to dismiss your costings on that basis - games are highly specialised, and the costs are still not nothing like the ones you claim.

Your response has nothing to do with the questions asked. We were not discussing my business other than my giving an example of editorial costs that are far from minimal. Unlike you, I have not claimed that every book by every author costs this much, only that costs can be in this range and higher or lower, but that regardless of what they are, the publisher fronts them and few authors would be willing to do so.

And you still haven't explained why my rates make a difference to the discussion in general. What does it matter whether I charge $1 or $1,000,000 per hour for my services? And you still haven't explained what I supposedly need to fully disclose.

You are very quick to dismiss opinions and knowledge that contradict you but you do so seemingly on the basis that "I said it, so it is the gospel." Not a very secure foundation.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by rhadin

Well if you think it will help, the total number of hours were 491.25.

491 hours? That works out to around... $100/hour.

Which gives a clue as to what your hourly rate is for some portion of your work. I gotta ask, being a nascent author with about 65% of my first novel and 31% of my second novel completed, just what level of editing was involved? Might want to hire you.

Was this a technical book or a novel? If a novel, did you have to do a great deal (I assume this must be the case with 491 hours logged on the project.) of story editing as well as basic grammar/syntax work?

I'm rather wondering, if it was a non-fiction work, were you cast in the role of making the book 'readable' to the average target audience?

So yes, all this information is relevant, considering how many of us who hang out here at MR are working on our own novels.

Derek

P.S. Was the editing work successful? IOW, is it possible to calculate how much more the author received because of your work?

[DawnFalcon]

As Derek said, I think it's strongly relevant.

And I haven't claimed that "every book by every author costs this much", I've said that for a book more complex and with more artwork than the average novel, the costs involved were far lower than the ones you have claimed.

I also disagree that few authors would be willing to front them, the online-sale RPG market is (again) dominated by (now that WOTC have removed themselves so thoroughly from it) authors doing just that, or at best with a few others.

Right now, very very few authors seem to "get it" on this (in the RPG field, people have had to, for several reasons). Bands are, increasingly, and books always seem to be a few steps behind...so I'm sure we'll see more and more authors take their own way to market in the years to come.

[Nathan Campos]

This(as every thing) have two sides. The low price is good to make the books much more acessible and then make more and more readers, but at the other side, Amazon will take just more and more pieces of the market, and monopolization is very bad

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

491 hours? That works out to around... $100/hour. . . . Which gives a clue as to what your hourly rate is for some portion of your work.

No, it really doesn't give a clue as to my hourly rate, which is why I hesitated to post the number of hours. The process isn't a single-pass process to which you can assign a single hourly rate. More importantly, it assumes that there is an hourly rate, as opposed to be based on a per manuscript page rate (in this case, the editor gets a flat rate per manuscript page, which generally is defined as 1500 characters including spaces, regardless of how long or short a time it takes to to do the editing) or a project rate (in a project rate, the editor gets paid $x to edit a project regardless of whether it takes 1 hour or 1,000 hours; the faster the editor, the higher the effective hourly rate). It would be better to view this as my effective hourly rate for this particular project. An effective hourly rate is a lot different from an hourly rate (I know that probably doesn't make sense, so let me give you an explanatory example: I agree to produce 1,000 widgets for the princely sum of $1,000. Simply dividing one by the other you get an effective cost of $1 per widget. But the contract really calls for 10 widgets made of silver and 3 inches in length, 90 widgets made of nickel 2 inches in length, and 900 widgets made of brass and 1 inch in length. I might charge $10 for each of the silver widgets, $5 for each of the nickel widgets, and and 50 cents for each of the brass widgets. So if you change the order to 20 silver, 80 nickel, and 900 brass widgets, you still get 1,000 widgets but the price is now $1,050 and the effective cost per widget is $1.05 rather than $1.00.

My point is that there is not necessarily any correlation between my actual rate and the rate you get by dividing hours into total cost.

Originally Posted by delphidb96

I gotta ask, being a nascent author with about 65% of my first novel and 31% of my second novel completed, just what level of editing was involved? Might want to hire you.

Thanks, I would be happy to consider offering my services to you. But to answer your question, this was a nonfiction, collaborative, technical book, and different levels of editing were required for different parts/chapters.

One thing that gets very lost in all of the discussion about costs is exactly what an editor does for an author and a book. The range of services is wide; some authors and publishers want nothing more than a final grammar and spelling check, whereas others want help in organizing the text, making sure that it follows a logical sequence, and fact checking (e.g., one author I know kept referring to 2 streets that didn't exist in New York City so it became difficult to follow the heroine's path; turned out the author had never been to NYC and combined street names from a European vacation with well-known NYC streets) in addition to grammar and spelling. You would be surprised how many authors change the gender of a character without realizing they have done so in the middle of a book or change the spelling of a location.

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Was this a technical book or a novel? If a novel, did you have to do a great deal (I assume this must be the case with 491 hours logged on the project.) of story editing as well as basic grammar/syntax work?

This particular project was technical so there was no story editing involved. But there were a multitude of authors whose "voices" and word choices had to be synchronized.

Originally Posted by delphidb96

I'm rather wondering, if it was a non-fiction work, were you cast in the role of making the book 'readable' to the average target audience?

In this case, not really. This was a book written by professionals for professionals with the same or similar background and training. So readable was not the criteria. However, there are still things that must be done. For example, professionals just love acronyms. Everything gets acronymized -- kind of like twittering in print -- and an editor has to make sure that acronyms are explained and used consistently to mean the same thing. It does no good for BLT to be used in chapter 2 to mean bacon, lettuce, and tomato and in chapter 3 to mean Bronx League of Trainmen.

Originally Posted by delphidb96

P.S. Was the editing work successful? IOW, is it possible to calculate how much more the author received because of your work?

It is not possible to calculate how much more authors receive as a result of an editor's work. Sometimes the difference is between being published and not being published; I do not know how one could evaluate whether it means the difference in sales of 1,000 or 10,000 copies. No matter how you cut it, the editor is not the author. Ultimately, final editorial decisions rest with the author. I have edited books that were a mess only to have the author reject every change and insist that the original version as submitted by the author be published. In some cases, the publishers declined to publish the book, in others they went ahead. in some cases a few hundred copies sold; in other cases, several thousand copies sold. Would the edited version have guaranteed publication? No, but it might have been the difference. Would publishing the edited version guaranteed increased sales? No, but it might have increased sales.

A good editor brings a lot to the table, not least of which is experience and (hopefully) a sharp eye. Editors can be had in all price ranges with all kinds of experience and can do all kinds of tasks. For example, my group can do both editing and page makeup, but we cannot create an index.

[omk3]

Thanks for your very informative post, rhadin!

[delphidb96]

Now see, *THAT* was informative and clarified much of what you do - and - despite your demurring, showed *why* you clearly earned your $50,000.

Derek

[llreader]

Originally Posted by rhadin

You would be surprised how many authors change the gender of a character without realizing they have done so in the middle of a book ...

Wait, what? Published authors? Like ink on paper published authors do this?

OMFG.

[Nathan Campos]

Thanks for the very very informative post rhadin

[calvin-c]

$2,000 was mentioned as the cost of cover artwork earlier, and countered by a reply saying that artwork could be had more cheaply-so I'd like to offer my own experience, with a non-profit that ordered a 'concept' painting to promote a new project.

The painting, by a local artist, cost $900 (about half the artist's 'regular' price, but he supported the project so he 'donated' half the price). But it took a team of 3 people a total of about 12 hours interviewing artists to select the artist. These were volunteers but, had they been paid (management/decision making level) the cost would probably have been at least $1000.

Of course with a dedicated 'art manager' the cost could have been lowered (it wouldn't have taken 3 people to make the decision), but then you'd need to spread the cost of the manager's position across all the artwork purchased. The same is true for staff artists-so I don't regard $2000 for cover/artwork unreasonable, once all the costs are considered.

Too often people, particularly believers in DIY, ignore the non-hourly cost of labor. DIY (self-publishers?) tend to regard labor as free while others regard salaries as overhead rather than as a 'project' cost. Neither case is true-it's just that they're both difficult to reduce to 'hard' numbers.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by calvin-c

$2,000 was mentioned as the cost of cover artwork earlier, and countered by a reply saying that artwork could be had more cheaply-so I'd like to offer my own experience, with a non-profit that ordered a 'concept' painting to promote a new project.

Interesting experience. However, it was not what I was referring to when I suggested cover design as costing $2,000+.

As with everything else there is more to cover design than just slapping image and text together. The better cover designers actually read the manuscript to get an idea of what the book is about and try to create original artwork/design that reflects or captures the essence of the book. The best designers get a lot more than $2,000 and are well worth their price.

Why? Think about your book buying experience at your local bookstore. A book has to compete for your attention with hundreds of other books that surround it and so it must grab your attention quickly. It is the cover that does this (or doesn't). If the cover doesn't encourage you to pick up the book, you will not read the jacket copy to determine if it is a book that might interest you, and you won't open the book to scrutinize the text.

Covers are a book's first impression and the book only has a few seconds to make a good impression. That is what you pay a cover designer to do -- grab a prospect's attention. You could be the most brilliant of authors -- perhaps the greatest author of all time -- but if no one buys your book, no one will ever know. And as people buy your books, the cover becomes less important because your name increasingly becomes the driver of sales. But until that point in time, you need to grab the prospect and the way it is done is by the cover.

Additionally, a good cover designer asks about how the book will be marketed and who the target audience is, and takes that into consideration when designing the cover so that the design can fulfill multiple needs.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by rhadin

Think about your book buying experience at your local bookstore. A book has to compete for your attention with hundreds of other books that surround it and so it must grab your attention quickly. It is the cover that does this (or doesn't). If the cover doesn't encourage you to pick up the book, you will not read the jacket copy to determine if it is a book that might interest you, and you won't open the book to scrutinize the text.

Only sometimes. Only if I'm wandering into the bookstore thinking, "I want to read something; I wonder what they have here that's interesting?" If I'm looking for a book based on a recommendation, or the new release in a series, or a book about religious icons in 15th century Scotland, the cover is much less important.

Covers can encourage impulse buys. And a *bad* cover can turn away a considered purchase. But they don't convince me to buy, or skip over, a book--in bookstores, it's rarely the books that have covers facing out that I'm interested in.

Of course, a good argument can be made that I'm not any mainstream publisher's target demographic; I rarely buy new books, except for non-DRM'd ebooks. (And RPG books. Which, again, I'm not buying based on cover art; I'm buying based on whether I think I'll get to play the game.)

[calvin-c]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

in bookstores, it's rarely the books that have covers facing out that I'm interested in.

That's been my experience, too, although I see signs of that changing with online bookstores (whether ebook or not). The B&M stores only seem to display the covers of maybe 10% of their books-if that. The online stores seem to display a cover for most of their books. (Now if they'd only beef up their 'look inside' capability to match the B&M.)

For me, it's more often the title & author that 'grabs' me enough that I pick it up-then I look at the cover. (The cover can 'veto' a book, for me, but doesn't generally cause an impulse buy.) OTOH, I can't say the cover is unimportant-if I thought it was unimportant I wouldn't waste time adding cover images to those of my ebooks which don't come with them. (All too many, unfortunately.)

So I have a hard time deciding about the value of covers. I like to think that the cover image plays no part in my buying decision-but if that's the case then why is it important to me? Strange-today must be one of those days when I'm a little bit odd.