More wood on the fire...

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by stustaff

Derek my imaginary future childs first drawing of him and his daddy will be worth less than a crumpled £10 note it will be less valuable.

Now to me it will be absolutely amazing and worth more than any money.

when I say Baens books are worth less and less valuable im saying that because they ARE, its not an opinion its a fact, Baen books sell for less than Macmillan books.

Macmillan wabt to protect their profits, they DO (I believe) turn over and make more profit than Baen, that means from a business/shareholder point of view they ARE more succesful.

Whilst I agree it is about money Macmillan pricing their books at $15 tells us that they believe they are worth that(or they want to destroy ebook market ) Baen KNOW their books would not sell as well at $15 and that at $6 they will make more money! AND see an increase in the print books they sell.

Its a GREAT model for Baen! not for Macmillan.

It's a great market for Baen, because they understand the market and have built their business accordingly. Macmillan has not, and expects the world to change to fit their needs. Baen will be around in 10 years, I make no bets about Macmillan....

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

One of these days, they may try an e-book only route....

They already went the ebook only route with Grantville Gazette . It was an accident, though. Eric Flint didn't realize that they were going to release a new edition every other month.

[Pardoz]

Originally Posted by stustaff

I was however making the point that Baen are not a company selling AAA author titles that would sell in Hardback at $25 each so they are making the right decision marketing wise for THEM.

This is a great argument. Except for the whole part where Baen are selling $25 hardcovers in numbers large enough to hit the NYT best-seller list - David Weber's last half-dozen novels have all hit it in hardcover, for example, as have some of the other authors they publish.

I'm anything but a fan of Weber's work - I've read a couple of his free books, and thought they were worth considerably less than what I paid for them - but obviously enough people disagree with me to qualify him as a AAA author if we're using new hardcover sales as a measuring stick.

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by stustaff

[SNIP]
I was however making the point that Baen are not a company selling AAA author titles that would sell in Hardback at $25 each so they are making the right decision marketing wise for THEM.

That does not mean that if macmillan were to follow the same marketing strategy as Baen that they would be succesful, also im fairly confident that macmillan male more money than Baen, so it could be argued quite sensibly that macmillans way works better!

Again where did I say I dont like Baen? or their marketing?

I haven't seen anywhere that you said you don't like them, or that you don't like their marketing. You do, however, seem to have a few small misunderstandings...

Many of Baen's titles are exactly those "AAA author titles that would sell in Hardback at $25 each!" For example, new books in the Honor Harrington series routinely hit the NYT Hardcover fiction bestsellers list. At prices exceeding $25.00 each. And so do new 1632 series books. And new Bujold. And...

Secondly, there are quite a few metrics on which we could argue that "Baen's way is better." Business-oriented metrics, at that. For example:

• Growth rate. Baen's been growing steadily over the past decade, measured in both unit sales and revenue. The publishing industry as a whole has been shrinking over that same period, in both unit sales and revenue.
• Sell-through. Baen's typical sell-through is north of 75%. Industry numbers average vastly worse. Baen is the envy of the industry on this front.
• Success at making the transition to electronic formats. Baen gets somewhere between 10% and 20% of gross from eBooks. (Estimates vary, depending on whose statements you start from, and how you parse the tea-leaves. Suffice it to say that electronic sales bring in more $$ than all non-US sales combined -- including Canadian sales.) NONE of the majors are anywhere near this number.
• Customer satisfaction. Baen's DTF (dead tree format) customers are pretty happy with them. Baen's eBook customers are thrilled with them.
• Brand loyalty. Baen's customers (especially for eBooks) actually notice and care who published the book. None of the majors can make that claim.
• Percentage of books that hit the NYT best-sellers list. Baen is kicking MacMillan's butt on this one! (There are some advantages to being small...)

Xenophon

[guyanonymous]

Fascinating. I love seeing smart people using reality as a basis for their future plans. Sounds like Baen has done so.

[Pardoz]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

I[*]Brand loyalty. Baen's customers (especially for eBooks) actually notice and care who published the book. None of the majors can make that claim.

For myself, that's not quite true. Of current players (leaving aside memories of the old Ace doubles, or those yellow-spined DAW paperbacks) I started noticing and caring when Macmillan (well, their Tor imprint) published a book long before the current brouhaha erupted, for reasons not entirely alien to the reason I notice when an author publishes a new book at Baen: when PC Hodgell's next book was announced as coming from Baen, my first thought was 'Great, I'll be able to buy it the day it releases.' When Dave Duncan announced his latest book was coming from Tor, my first thought was 'Damn, I guess I'm never going to have a chance to read it, since they almost never release e-books.'

[guyanonymous]

But they'll release it for $15.99 and lower the price over <an unspecified length of> time. I suspect in 120 years as the copyright in the US expires.

[TallMomof2]

I just went over and made me semi annual Baen webscription purchase. At this point I usually get 3 or 4 new to me ebooks (the others are in past webscriptions). IMO, any genre publisher could successfully adopt the Baen webscription model and prosper.

[guyanonymous]

I think that the model would work especially well for the Romance industry where, I suspect, the books are generally read once and forgotten. That's my bias, though, as they seem to me to be repeated clones of one another.

[Elfwreck]

Baen started with the premise, "let's believe our customers are decent people, and smart, and will therefore want to pay money to support the people who bring them what they want to read."

Instead of "let's believe our customers are borderline-criminals, waiting for the chance to screw us over."

The "customers are cool" approach works. It works *tremendously* well for Baen, which is a big player in a niche market; it's working tolerably well for smaller companies like Loose Id and Samhain Press, who are in a niche that doesn't get discussed much in public.

The "customers are bandits from whom we must seize our rightful pay" approach is not working so well. The customers don't care if the publishers are flailing under economic shifts; they don't tell their friends to buy more of that publisher's books; they don't forgive mistakes; they don't buy a copy of something they already had as a freebie.

I'm not saying, "all the major publishers should adopt Baen's methods." A lot of Baen's methods work precisely because they're small and niche-focused. But all the major publishers should look at Baen's methods, and figure out how many of them they could steal or adapt, because those methods *work*, and what Macmillan and Random House are doing... isn't working so well. The "free promo ebook--laden with DRM and don't you dare share it with anyone else" gets downloads, but not referrals.

[Guns4Hire]

Originally Posted by Bremen Cole

Unfortunately I saw a whole catalog of Baen books on torrent in one download file . If I could have I would have taken them out of there..... there is no good reason for their products to be on torrents, and I urge everyone to not punish the good with the bad!

Oh I am not saying that their product isn't out there at all. I am just saying its out there a lot less.

[guyanonymous]

I think you're right. I've never shoplifted in my life. I resent those stores that make me hand over my bag, or consent to a bag search. In fact, aside from Costco (I'm given a membership as a gift each year), I tend to avoid such stores like the plague, even when I have no bag with me.

[Guns4Hire]

Originally Posted by stustaff

Do you have some evidence to show that baens policy is helping them do better than oooh say Macmillans policy?

if you do then great unfortunately I doubt it's the case.

Money wise I don't. Though there is quite a bit of rumor from Baen from different internal sources that say they are doing gangbusters. But I am talking about the level of piracy you see for Baen's books versus Macmillan's. Its quite apparent.

[fugazied]

I love how they phrase the marketing mumbo jumbo like consumers will find benefit in the new model.

Sorry $15 for an ebook is not acceptable. These companies will soon get a harsh taste of what the free market does on the Internet. People won't buy $15 ebooks and instead will go piratebay or skip the title.

[LisaPT]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

So it's all right for the big publishers to steal from the ebook customers?

What saddens me is that the only people that will be hurt by their actions are the authors as more and more once-upon-a-time customers make the switch to the darknet and ebook piracy.

Derek

I would never walk into a bookstore and start shoving books into a tote bag and walk out. The fact that it is electronic bits and I can do it from inside my house, doesn't make it any less stealing. If ebooks are priced out of my budget, I'll just read classics on my reader and go back to dead tree books for other stuff.

I am not going to let any sellers, publishers, or businesses take away my integrity -- some days I think that is all I have.