Angry Robot Books Want Your Opinion on Ebook Pricing

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by LeeH

A few people have brought up the issue of DRM. My opinion? It's Evil. It serves no-one.

hallelujah !

Oh, and we won't be producing e-versions of original novels from scanned texts. All our eBooks will be produced from original text files - likely to be in ePub and Mobi versions, though I'd be interested to hear your views on the matter.

hallelujah II !!

and from mjh215: "Treat your customers with respect".
Well, for us this is a given, and the main reason we started asking these questions in the first place.

based on your posts here i'd say you are all set to get yourself some very loyal and enthusiastic customers. congratulations !! the publishing world needs a lot more people who think like you do. karma to you for that !

On a personal note, I'm glad I've found this site. I've been reading eBooks for a little over 7 years, now (and I publish a weekly electronic fiction magazine at HubFiction.com </plug>) - I'll certainly be coming back.

welcome again, we're glad to have you. we'll be looking forward to hearing more from you.

[Moejoe]

No DRM? ePub versions? Dan Abnett on board? Is it wrong of me to want to marry a book publisher's science fiction imprint

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

No DRM? ePub versions? Dan Abnett on board? Is it wrong of me to want to marry a book publisher's science fiction imprint

if it's wrong, you don't want to be right ?

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

if it's wrong, you don't want to be right ?

Not in this instance They're doing everything right here, it's like I'm in some kind of dream world where everything I want is coming true. I get to purchase DRM free in ePub, support writers I like and...well there's not much more you can ask for.

By the beard of Odin, don't let this be a tease!!!

[LeeH]

Damn! Am I too late for April 1?

Gonna have to deliver, then...

[LeeH]

btw, if any of you are at EasterCon in Bradford (UK) next weekend, my glass is always in need of a refill - I'll be on the eBook panel on Sunday night, which is scheduled up against the RockStar competition, so we'll need all the audience members we can get...

[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by LeeH

Thanks for the (very quick) response, everyone. It's gratifying to see so much support.

And thank you for posting here and engaging!

Originally Posted by LeeH

A typical genre bestseller sells far fewer than this number, so that's a major factor in setting out any pricing structure for any genre imprint. We'd love to sell 50,000 or each of our books, but it just isn't going to happen, so we have to price accordingly - to make a profit on a much lower number. If we don't, we stop publishing - it's as simple as that.

Over the *lifetime* of the book? C'mon, I think you'll sell a lot more than 50,000 copies. See, that's where pbook thinking doesn't apply to ebooks -- it costs nothing to maintain a back catalog. I'll accept that we're talking speculative fiction here and not mainstream titles. But regardless of the number, the point is, as others have pointed out, the more copies of the ebook you sell, the marginal cost per book decreases. So I don't expect you to maintain your target profit margin on the books that don't sell as well; your job is to throw lots of titles out there and let the bestsellers carry the day.

Originally Posted by LeeH

You're absolutely right. We can't educate the consumer to the intricacies of the publishing business. It's not just that they won't believe you, they just won't be interested enough to care. So, the way we address the issue is through pricing, but it's a delicate balance. It's a learning curve, all round.

Well, again, I think if you look at what Baen and Amazon are doing, you can't go wrong on pricing. But if you're looking for a price point that will make you stand out and move volume, I think $3 - $5 would draw a lot of attention.

Originally Posted by LeeH

A few people have brought up the issue of DRM. My opinion? It's Evil. It serves no-one.

Yay.

Originally Posted by LeeH

Oh, and we won't be producing e-versions of original novels from scanned texts. All our eBooks will be produced from original text files - likely to be in ePub and Mobi versions, though I'd be interested to hear your views on the matter.

EPUB and MOBI for sure. But the more formats the better; the smashwords data showed a fairly even distribution among various formats, and it didn't even include LIT.

Originally Posted by LeeH

The eBook shares the fixed costs, it doesn't bypass them.

True for new titles, but remember your back catalog! Well, I suppose your imprint doesn't have one but you should be able to tap into Eos and Voyager and Harper's older titles?

Originally Posted by LeeH

Absolutely, but let's be realistic, here - the percentage of eBooks we sell from our own site (at least initially) will be far lower than those we sell through retail channels.

For ebooks though this doesn't have to be the case; there's lots of opportunity to makes one's mark as *the* retailer for *your* particular product, especially if you can offer a lower price directly than Amazon can for the Kindle version.

Originally Posted by LeeH

Selling eARCs? That's an interesting idea. We currently make eARCs available to all our reviewers before the physical ARC is available, but I can confidently state we have not considered selling this version. First impressions are, I'm not 100% comfortable with this idea - the ARC, after all, is supposed to be a review tool, and selling it means you are making available via retail an imperfect item. Interesting, though, and I'll certainly bring the idea up.

I know Baen does some of this, but personally I wouldn't want to buy an ARC. I want to see the final version. Would some people buy both copies? Sure, but on the other hand people might buy only the ARC and not like the quality despite all warnings to them not to expect anything polished.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by LeeH

btw, if any of you are at EasterCon in Bradford (UK) next weekend, my glass is always in need of a refill - I'll be on the eBook panel on Sunday night, which is scheduled up against the RockStar competition, so we'll need all the audience members we can get...

you might want to post a message in this thread ; there seems to be at least one member planning to attend and possibly more.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by LeeH

btw, if any of you are at EasterCon in Bradford (UK) next weekend, my glass is always in need of a refill - I'll be on the eBook panel on Sunday night, which is scheduled up against the RockStar competition, so we'll need all the audience members we can get...

Just checked the schedule. I will got and listen to the E-book panel if I do not get stuck in the bar...

[mjh215]

LeeH: One thing for whomever at your company is going to be handling generating the eBooks to be aware of is that currently the Sony's ePub interpreter has a slight flaw. The text segments inside the ePub container are limited to 300k chunks. If it is taken into consideration then there is no noticable difference in the outputted text, but won't work otherwise. MobileRead has a section on ePub and conversion utilities like those built into Kovid Goyal's calibre software take this into consideration.

It isn't a problem of the ePub format but the way Sony currently has their devices implementing it. I mention this so you can deal with it in the early stages and not have to backtrack later on. We've noticed some places that are distributing ePub's without this in mind, I think one being Project Gutenberg.

If anyone wants to chime in or correct me feel free, this is simply my understanding of the situation presently.

-MJ

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by LeeH

Other than warehousing (which should be relatively low for a small imprint like ours) and the cost of printing (which is pretty much the lowest cost involved in the whole process), the cost of producing an eBook is identical to the cost of a paperback.

Except that, if you're producing both an ebook and pbook, the edit/artwork/etc. costs are split between them. (Formatting is different for both, but should be related enough that ebook doesn't take just as long as pbook formatting; some of it should carry over.)

And additional paper copies cost money (printing & distributing); additional digital copies don't.

We're aware that there are serious costs in ebook production--what we challenge is the notion that those costs are, and continue to be, the same as pbook costs.
Cost of producing N pbooks, including getting it in stores: $X. Therefore, N x cost per book must equal X+profit.

Cost of producing N ebooks, including getting it in digital stores: $X-Y, storage/shipping cost, possibly also author advance, artist fees, and so on, if those are already covered by pbook costs. N x cost has to be bigger than (X-Y) for a profit.

Cost of producing an additional N pbooks: $X-Z, edit/format costs.
Cost of producing an additional N ebooks: $0.

Ebooks, unlike pbooks, don't automatically become less likely to sell a year after release; they're still there on the site, findable with the search function. Older books in a series, or older books by a popular author, can sell just as well as new books.

Selling eARCs? That's an interesting idea. We currently make eARCs available to all our reviewers before the physical ARC is available, but I can confidently state we have not considered selling this version. First impressions are, I'm not 100% comfortable with this idea - the ARC, after all, is supposed to be a review tool, and selling it means you are making available via retail an imperfect item. Interesting, though, and I'll certainly bring the idea up.

FWIW, I have almost no interest in eARCs. The only books I'd be interested in reading advance copies of are things like Harry Potter--and not because I want to read it early, but because I don't want to be barraged with spoilers by people who release the ending to discussion groups just to be jerks.

However, I know some people love getting early versions, and enjoy watching books change through the editing process. And if it's permissible, some of the people who'd buy them, would happily post online reviews... more publicity, in areas you don't normally have access to.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

FWIW, I have almost no interest in eARCs. The only books I'd be interested in reading advance copies of are things like Harry Potter--and not because I want to read it early, but because I don't want to be barraged with spoilers by people who release the ending to discussion groups just to be jerks.

Here is the real ending of Harry Potter:
http://bidalaka.com/picofarad/pf9/last.html

[sirbruce]

One problem with your analysis, Elfwreck, is you're missing the assumption -- not a necessarily true assumption, mind you, but one which must be made for business reasons -- that every ebook sale is one less pbook sale. So you can't just ignore the pbook overhead. If ebook sales were purely additive, then you could. There's no doubt that ebook does stimulate demand and that ebooks are bought by people who would never buy the pbook. But nevertheless, you can't just assume the cost of overhead doesn't exist; Angry Robot doesn't want ebooks to be an afterthought. *If* you were going to treat them as such, then it would mean higher pbook prices to cover the falling demand (since people start buying the cheaper ebooks rather than the pbooks), or fewer ebook titles (only those ebooks that had large enough pbook sales would be offered, since ebooks wouldn't be covering their share of overhead).

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

One problem with your analysis, Elfwreck, is you're missing the assumption -- not a necessarily true assumption, mind you, but one which must be made for business reasons -- that every ebook sale is one less pbook sale. So you can't just ignore the pbook overhead. If ebook sales were purely additive, then you could. There's no doubt that ebook does stimulate demand and that ebooks are bought by people who would never buy the pbook. But nevertheless, you can't just assume the cost of overhead doesn't exist; Angry Robot doesn't want ebooks to be an afterthought. *If* you were going to treat them as such, then it would mean higher pbook prices to cover the falling demand (since people start buying the cheaper ebooks rather than the pbooks), or fewer ebook titles (only those ebooks that had large enough pbook sales would be offered, since ebooks wouldn't be covering their share of overhead).

Experience at Baen suggests that eBooks have three effects (no particular order):

• eBooks substitute for some paper sales. (Note, however, that they make more from selling an eBook than selling mmpb or trade-pb. It's only a lose if the eBook substitutes for a hardcover.) For example, I purchase fewer dead-tree books from Baen than I did before they started selling eBooks. But note that I've tripled(!) my purchases from Baen in dollar terms over the same period. And most of those dollars go to the Webscriptions store, rather than to retailers, so Baen also makes more profit from each dollar. These days I buy their entire output in bits. I also buy paper copies of the few books that are my most treasured favorites.
• eBooks increase paper sales over all. Lots of people either try free samples or buy bits, and then buy dead-tree-format as well. I expect this effect to slowly diminish as eBooks go mainstream (which they haven't yet done).
• eBooks (especially when aggressively priced) introduce readers to authors they would otherwise have ignored. This helps build an audience for those authors, and so leads to increased sales in the long run.

After 10 years selling from their own store, Baen is making more money from eBooks than from all non-US paper sales combined (including Canadian sales). Reading between the lines of various public statements they've made, they seem to be running somewhere around 20% of total sales through Webscriptions -- and the share of profits coming from bits is higher than that.

Xenophon

[sirbruce]

Well, the average price for a new ebook at Baen is $6. $5 for older titles. In a bundle with 4 or 5 other titles, $4 each. But they charge $15 for those ARCs.