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

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by rhadin

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.

I believe you're right - for about 35%-45% of the 'first-time-I've-read-anything-by-this-author' purchases. The cover art can reel me in to at least read the title, and maybe the back-cover blurb (or inside front flap for dust-jacketed hardcovers). From there, if my interest is piqued (picqued? I'm always forgetting this one.), I'll move on to reading the first couple of pages. By then, for a new author, or new series by a known author, I'll have made my choice to buy or not. Which is why I rely so much on Amazon's 'Search Inside' feature for online shopping. It gives me a chance to do more 'research' than the tiny blurb one gets at Fictionwise or eReader.com.

Still, I've seen great stories which have 'artistic' cover art by well-known artists (and some no-previous-samples) which clearly were created without ever bothering to crack open the pages of the book. Barf!

I try, given that I've got decent Photoshop skills, to create a basic idea of what I want for my covers. I don't expect them to be used in the final but it gives a better idea of what scene I'd like imaged.

Right now I'm working on creating a sample cover for a friend's work which he's shopping around. It can be time-consuming!

Derek

[calvin-c]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Still, I've seen great stories which have 'artistic' cover art by well-known artists (and some no-previous-samples) which clearly were created without ever bothering to crack open the pages of the book. Barf!

I'm currently (re)reading Leigh Brackett's Eric John Stark stories. She clearly says he has dark skin & black hair-yet the cover depicts a white-skinned blonde!

I'm pretty sure that's not the worst example, but it's the most recent one I've encountered.

[omk3]

Covers are important, whether we like it or not. If you know nothing about the author or the book, then the title, along with the cover, along with the blurb are the only things that can convey to you not only what the book is about, but how it goes about it. Is it humorous? Is it lighthearted? Is it scary? Any of these can be misleading, but good covers usually make a better job of representing a book than a synopsis does. They are the face of the book, the first impression you have to rely on before you have a chance to read it, just as the face of a person is the only thing you can judge them by before you interact with them.

Of course if you already know something about the book, or the author, or if it comes recommended, then the significance of the cover is greatly diminished. It's still something nice to look at though, especially for paper books. I know there are covers that would make me embarrassed to read the books in public.

[DawnFalcon]

Rhadin;

All very interesting, but complex and highly technical manuals are not the same market as novels, no? They're not even in the same ballpark, even. So I don't think the value is really directly relevant... I still think that your values are ludicrously high.

(And I include my time to write a detailed description, sketch and to find other similar images in my estimate for the cover)

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

All very interesting, but complex and highly technical manuals are not the same market as novels, no?

You are correct, the markets are different and so the covers are designed for the market. Also, the more specialized the market, the less important the cover is; conversely, the broader the market, the more important the cover.

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

I still think that your values are ludicrously high.

You may think they are much too high, but publishers pay them and so they are marketplace values. Whether you think they are worth it for your market is not the issue; what the market pays is the issue, and the market does pay these kinds of values and more, just as it pays significantly less as witnessed by your posts. And the original suggestion was that authors should hire freelancers to do it all rather than using publishers and my point is that few authors have the resources or are willing to pay out of their own pocket and take the gamble when a publisher will do it.

I once read (and can't remember the source) that (in paraphrase) the difference between a smart person and a not-so-smart person is that the latter gambles with his/her own money whereas the former gambles with someone else's money. (Sounds a lot like our big banks.)

Think of it like the automobile market: a $10,000 car will get you from point A to point B just as readily as a $350,000 car, yet there are $10,000 cars and $1,000,000+ cars being bought and sold in the marketplace. You may think spending $50,000 on a car is foolish, expensive, or ludicrous because you are satisfied with a $15,000 car that fits your needs, but your car doesn't fit everyone's needs or do the job for everyone.

[DawnFalcon]

They're old market values. Don't be surprised when they get undercut by sharder people, is all I can say. Heck, I've had a word with a few friends who are a RPG house and they are currently both laughing their asses off at this thread and reconsidering their several-year-old decision not to get into novel epublishing.

[brecklundin]

Originally Posted by calvin-c

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.

All to true...good self employed sorts understand the value of their time and can make decisions based on the effiency of DIY or just paying to have it done professionally. In another life I worte software for a living...still I knew that when I moved into netwrk troubleshooting and design it was cheaper and smarter for me to buy software for $500 to track my time, expenses and generate billing rathter than rolling my own over time.

I could earn more working with clients rather than spending 100's of hours slowly developing the code. Same for accounting software, though I once wrote my own word processor with a development kit from the OLD Borland.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

They're old market values. Don't be surprised when they get undercut by sharder people, is all I can say. Heck, I've had a word with a few friends who are a RPG house and they are currently both laughing their asses off at this thread and reconsidering their several-year-old decision not to get into novel epublishing.

It seems that every judgment you make is based on the RPG market. What makes you think the RPG market is representative of the world of publishing as opposed to being simply a niche, specialized market?

As for your friends "laughing their asses off at this thread and reconsidering their several-year-old decision not to get into novel epublishing", all it says to me is that they are probably knowledgable about the RPG market and not very knowledgable about any other book market. I would encourage them to get into the novel epublishing market and to report back to us when they make their first million dollars in net profit.

Simply laughing one's ass off isn't a very good business plan nor does it demonstrate anything more than that one has an ass to laugh off.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by rhadin

It seems that every judgment you make is based on the RPG market. What makes you think the RPG market is representative of the world of publishing as opposed to being simply a niche, specialized market?
...

It's not. It's VERY far from it. It's a niche, that's all.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by rhadin

It seems that every judgment you make is based on the RPG market. What makes you think the RPG market is representative of the world of publishing as opposed to being simply a niche, specialized market?

Please explain how a RPG is in any respect less complex than a novel?

Please don't play the fool.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Please explain how a RPG is in any respect less complex than a novel?

The issues being discussed have little to do with complexity. An RPG may or may not be less complex than a novel.

RPG fans may be more accepting of a cover designed by an inexpensive cover designer who uses all block lettering and a stock picture because they already know the relevancy of the book to them. A person who is deeply into playing chess is interested in every book that talks about chess and is not concerned about the cover art. No great expense needs to be incurred to induce them to look at the book.

Conversely, an unknown novelist who seeks to break into the mass mystery market and compete against Ruth Rendell for the same audience cannot use a cover designed by his third grade cousin with crayola. Readers will view it as amateurish and assume the content is also amateurish, rightly or wrongly.

Editorial, marketing, and design costs are not defined by complexity or by size, although each plays a role in the final costs. One doesn't plan a marketing budget based on whether the book is 16 pages or 600 pages.

And because it doesn't seem to be getting through, I will state again: no one is attacking RPG or the fact that RPG books can get away with $50 cover costs. Every market is different. What is being said is that simply because the RPG niche doesn't require you to spend more than $50 on cover art doesn't mean that every other market's cover costs are the same or can be the same.

A computer coding book may also have inexpensive cover art costs but very expensive editorial costs as each line of code is checked for accuracy. A drug book written for doctors may have relatively low cover art costs and very high editorial costs because of the accuracy required (I certainly wouldn't want the amount you spend on RPG for editing to be the standard for a book that a doctor will use to decide which medicine to prescribe to my child; I want the publisher to spend however much it costs to be sure that the book is as accurate as is possible).

A novel may have low editorial costs but high cover art and marketing costs because the author is trying to become the next JK Rowling and needs to get huge numbers of book buyers to at least look at her book. An RPG may have very low cover art and marketing costs because the game involved has a known audience of 15,000, because players have been waiting for a book that descibes the rules for 87th encounter between two primary characters, and because the book isn't intended to induce rest of the reading world to become game players.

RPG is neither the beginning nor the ending of the world of publishing; it is a niche in a vast world of publishing and just as a single, universal rule cannot cover every possibility imaginable in RPG, what RPG spends for editorial, production, and marketing cannot be (and is not) the benchmark against which all the world of publishing is, can, or should be measured.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by rhadin

The issues being discussed have little to do with complexity. An RPG may or may not be less complex than a novel.

RPG fans may be more accepting of a cover designed by an inexpensive cover designer who uses all block lettering and a stock picture because they already know the relevancy of the book to them. A person who is deeply into playing chess is interested in every book that talks about chess and is not concerned about the cover art. No great expense needs to be incurred to induce them to look at the book.

True to a greater extend for chess books than for RPG. Sorry, but gone are the days when a ziploc baggie and a chapbooklet with some goofy hand-drawn line art is going to be even noticed by the RPG fanboy.

Conversely, an unknown novelist who seeks to break into the mass mystery market and compete against Ruth Rendell for the same audience cannot use a cover designed by his third grade cousin with crayola. Readers will view it as amateurish and assume the content is also amateurish, rightly or wrongly.

Thus speaks a person who's never read a mystery based in and around a home kindergarten. Sorry, but there are plenty of 'crude' pieces of cover art that fit quite well with the books in question. Just as there are crude pieces of cover art that in no way reflect upon the story - and actually detract from sales, as you proposed.

Editorial, marketing, and design costs are not defined by complexity or by size, although each plays a role in the final costs. One doesn't plan a marketing budget based on whether the book is 16 pages or 600 pages.

Yep. It often depends upon what the target readership is - for cover art. For interior layout and the edited message, perfection of presentation is a primary key. One can forgive an amateurish cover, but not an amateur editing job.

And because it doesn't seem to be getting through, I will state again: no one is attacking RPG or the fact that RPG books can get away with $50 cover costs. Every market is different. What is being said is that simply because the RPG niche doesn't require you to spend more than $50 on cover art doesn't mean that every other market's cover costs are the same or can be the same.

A computer coding book may also have inexpensive cover art costs but very expensive editorial costs as each line of code is checked for accuracy. A drug book written for doctors may have relatively low cover art costs and very high editorial costs because of the accuracy required (I certainly wouldn't want the amount you spend on RPG for editing to be the standard for a book that a doctor will use to decide which medicine to prescribe to my child; I want the publisher to spend however much it costs to be sure that the book is as accurate as is possible).

A novel may have low editorial costs but high cover art and marketing costs because the author is trying to become the next JK Rowling and needs to get huge numbers of book buyers to at least look at her book. An RPG may have very low cover art and marketing costs because the game involved has a known audience of 15,000, because players have been waiting for a book that descibes the rules for 87th encounter between two primary characters, and because the book isn't intended to induce rest of the reading world to become game players.

Here I have to disagree. While the cover art may well suck me in to examine it more closely, if the story isn't well edited and if it is written in a difficult to read style with little of interest, I ain't gonna shell out the big bucks no matter how wonderful the cover art is!

RPG is neither the beginning nor the ending of the world of publishing; it is a niche in a vast world of publishing and just as a single, universal rule cannot cover every possibility imaginable in RPG, what RPG spends for editorial, production, and marketing cannot be (and is not) the benchmark against which all the world of publishing is, can, or should be measured.

No one said it was. What I think the other posters are trying to say is that an RPG is just as complex as many mainstream novels.

Derek

[DawnFalcon]

Of course it's an issue of complexity.


"RPG fans may be more accepting of a cover designed by an inexpensive cover designer who uses all block lettering and a stock picture because they already know the relevancy of the book to them"

No, they are not. It's a cutthroat, competitive market and presentation and layout is critical to reviewing and selling well, especially because of 05-06 glut of poorly laid out and formated books. Have you actually looked at some of the samples out there, or was that really an attempt to make it look like you really just shot your own argument in the foot?

It's a niche, but your costings are ludicrously high and bluntly I think you're doing very well at looking to be part of the issue which ebooks need to overcome.

(Oh, and your marketing budget is also utterly flipping ludicrous. For $5k, I can put a banner advert in front of millions of people in the correct market. I can't guarantee any particular website, but...Project Wonderful in particular is bluntly AMAZING.)


Derek - More complex Much moreso. And it's a highly critical (as in "critical if you do stuff wrong") market out there these days.

[DawnFalcon]

Okay, it's become clear what Rhadin's actual position it. He's basically defending the status quo at all costs, and no wonder he's trying to defend the blatantly ridiculous, rip off costs he mentions. Well, bluntly: I'm going to laugh when the old publishers fail and your business evaporates, because nobody with sense (hihi old publishers!) is going to pay your rates.

It's precisely the thinking which lead to this thread, "predatory pricing". Tick tock.

[Nathan Campos]

Selling eBooks in a very low price is good to estimulate people to read