$5 – $8 is a very good target price range for an ebook in my opinion as a reader. It leaves plenty of margin for the publisher and for the writer.

Your comments on writer awareness is also on the money. Publishers have sucked in authors in an appalling way for decades, limiting their rights and making enormous profits for a bloated and inefficient industry.
Now Publishers are scaring authors that the nasty ebooks are hurting them and they are trying to tell the reader than they represent the poor struggling writer.

Publishers can’t have it both ways with their whinging and whining.

We need a new awareness by the writers and a new breed of publisher.

But in this mix we need a new kind of online publisher web site that promotes new writers through better previews and reviews. This is needed to compensate for the promotional shortfall left by the coming disappearance of the ‘big publisher’.

It is working with DRM (Digital Rights Management) on video games. People were 1 staring new games into oblivion that had intrusive DRM on Amazon. Due to the backlash on Amazon, video game companies have been forced into changing the DRM or removing it completely off of new games. This new uprising with e-books will work however it will take time. Publisher’s, author’s, and Amazon will lose money which will force them to adapt and actually listen to the people that are paying their salaries.

On a side note, I wonder when companies will spring up that will allow you to create your own e-books and bypass the publishers? In the next 10 years we might see something like this.

1. I’m going to go to dealerships and vandalize cars I want but I think are too expensive.
2. I’m going to turn off refrigerators in stores that sell price-fixed milk.
3. I’m going to go into department stores and rip clothes on the rack that are overpriced.

Great idea.

There are more books published now than at any time in the past. This is part of what it makes it harder for any garden variety author. People have more choice. They aren’t limited to what is in the country town newsagent or the library.

The ‘but you won’t have anything to read’ argument is baseless. There have been millions of books published. No one is going to run out.

I’ve said this before: if every single publisher gets disintegrated by aliens overnight, tomorrow authors will be selling their books directly.

Me, I might read a few more academic papers, I’d imagine.

Seriously, I have found $1.99 a fair price for an ebook, though I am currently releasing already-published backlist. I still make more than I did on paper copies at that price. It has gone so well that I am releasing an original novel THE SKULL RING on March 1. I don’t know if this is the way my career will go, as I am currently seeking a major publisher, too, but one of my big regrets so far is my carelessness with all my backlist digital rights. I get them back eventually, but i don’t hear many authors talking about the lifespan of their books and careers and how things may change once the dust settles.

I believe ebook prices will naturally move downward and I’m seeing bigname backlist in the $4-$5 range now. The inflated prices will only be for six months or so on bestseller hardcovers, while the rest of the world moves on.

I do understand the various production costs in publishing a book, and I know what goes into formatting a paper file into an ebook (an hour of time), and I believe the prices should be amortized over the various formats. My self-released backlist The Red Church is outselling my newer NY ebook by at least at 10 to 1 margin at a third of the price. Lower ebook prices will mean overall better income for authors, assuming they haven’t given away 80 or more percent of that income to a publisher for deals that could last a lifetime.

Authors should still partner with publishers, but perhaps it’s time to think of a book as remaining permanently in print instead of having three months of shelf life.

Scott Nicholson
hauntedcomputer.blogspot.com

Ah, yes. Me and the 100 books I bought and read last year are destroying authors. THAT makes sense!

Look, if I had ANY faith that the publishers would actually lower the prices after six months or whatever, I would be okay with what’s happened. But when a book has been a $7 mass market paperback for over a decade and is selling at Fictionwise for $14, it makes me feel like the publishers don’t really care about me. I worry that this means they are trying to make ebooks so unpalatable that they will sell so few of them they can then turn around and say ‘see, nobody wants them.’ And people like me who don’t have a house massive enough to store every book we read will go back to the libraries and used book stores because we won’t be able to buy books anymore.

If you read the post, it isn’t just about the agency pricing model. It’s about geographical restrictions, it’s about trying to buy a book and being told you can’t do it even though the book is out there and available. It’s about paying customers who are NOT going to the darknet and are trying to buy the books legitimately and are being turned away and left feeling like nobody wants their business. THIS IS A PROBLEM FOR THE AUTHORS TOO. Real authors, mid-list authors such as the one that poster accused me of destroying, have lost ACTUAL MONETARY PROFIT from readers like me due solely to the fact that we live in the wrong country. And when I have emailed them about it, as I said, most of them were either not terribly concerned or said it wasn’t really up to them and oh well. Only ONE of them actually helped me, and I rewarded her by buying the book when I was able to.

The business model you guys have is BROKEN. My post is a call to arms to you to HELP ME FIX IT. I don’t have authors. I am not a greedy, selfish person who doesn’t want to pay for what I read. I haven’t even BOUGHT a Kindle book (except for a replacement for the on-board dictionary) because I don’t support their Kindle-only DRM.

I am intrigued by Tobias Buckell’s post in that rather than reassuring me that he values my business, that he wants to see these barriers to purchasing end too, that he would like to work with passionate readers to get a better model going for everyone, he jumps on the price point issue (which wasn’t even my main point) and treats me like his enemy. If he really does not care about the experience of an avid reader and book buyer like me, what hope does he have for making a profit off his writing? Why turn people away with a bad attitude when you can instead agree to work with them and help bring about a system where they can spend their book-buying money more easily?

I’m not going to urge you to blind faith. Your skepticism is entirely fair, and I’m not out to play Macmillan’s PR rep. All I’ll say is that I think using this strategy at Amazon might give them better feedback on where to set the price points to maximise sales at different levels of service — i.e. to strike a satisfactory bargain with as many people as possible. And that if they don’t set the “self-service buffet option” — the price point for the ebook when the mmpb comes out — at a comparable level, the lack of sales will tell them loud and clear that they’re fricking morons. Finding the right price points is, I think, in their self-interest, and I’d say the right price point for the ebook on the mmpb release *has* to be lower than the mmpb. Whether they get that… we’ll see.

I mean, I could speculate that the existing Amazon pricing screws with any data they might get from Fictionwise enough that they couldn’t feel their way to a fair price, and so they let conservatism win out with a crude “charge high and hope they bite” attitude, that now ebook sales are taking off they’re trying to set their house in order with a coherent strategy they didn’t have before… but that’s pure speculation, *not* a case I’d actually argue. My main hope for an agency model with ebooks is that it feeds into the fiction-as-service paradigm I see as a necessary part of dealing with the new reality.

I’ll take that bet for 1000 internets. I’ll win on the “all day” clause, cause if they do it at all, it’s not gonna be *all day*. Yay! 1000 internets for me!

OK, I’m being facetious, but look at the reality of buying second-hand *sight unseen*. Yeah, some are up as “new” but “nearly new,” “good condition,” and so on… it’s still a bit of a gamble. No doubt, sales will be lost, and no doubt some publishers spend *some* of the day worrying about this, but you’re (quite literally) overstating the extent of this concern. I mean, at least on ebay you can *see* what you’re buying. But I’ll come back to this.

With your questions about the Kindle, etc., remember that my point was specifically about why these aren’t seen as significant problems with hardcopy books. You only have so many people in your monkeysphere to lend your copy to, hand to hand. Second-hand bookshops and libraries are localised, limited in coverage and what stock they’re likely to hold, or even interested in holding. You can’t *give* books away to second-hand bookstore owners half the time. I’ve tried to flog books to a second-hand store to get money for food (couldn’t afford postage if I sold em on ebay) and had no luck. Bernard Blacks to a man, those tight-fisted misanthropic bastards. *Ahem* Anyway, point is, the effect of those sorta non-sales is not a big enough bite out of potentials to bother most, I’d say. At least, not enough to make them see ebooks as advantageous in comparison in that regard.

The factors you point to indicate the opposite, if anything. The minority that worries about that will also worry about epiracy and probably more so, because it’s a conservative mentality, a mentality of fear. In fact, I’d say, that’s included within a larger contingent who *don’t* worry about that but *do* worry about epiracy. The DRM lobby basically. They’ve clearly been strong enough to effect the restrictions you point to, all clearly driven by a fear of the unlimited replication that the new media facilitates. (For what it’s worth, I’m totally with Kevin that *this* sort of stuff lowers the value of the ebook. It’s a limitation of the service, like not being able to have the chicken jalfrezi in the self-service buffet.)

I’ll go further. Amazon does factor in here because it’s an online redistribution channel, and therefore part of the whole “what will the interwebs do to publishing?” question. It scales up second-hand bookstores to an international coverage, and right at your fingertips. So, yeah, I can see *that* being more of a concern for publishers, but I’d bet their *biggest* worry is based on the used books being accessible from the main page for the title, cause this is essentially like having B&N stock second-hand copies right beside the new hb. Would they be so worried if it was another site, equally big but distinct? I doubt it. Ebay already exists and there’s nothing they can do about it.

All of this is to say that publishers aren’t seeing huge benefits in ebooks versus dead tree on the bases you suggest because it’s really conservatives versus progressives on both media. And to wire this into what I’m saying to Dave above, I think a lot of it is to do with a paradigm of fiction-as-product being destabilised. The conservatives are locked into that paradigm so they panic. In the more progressive thinkers on this — those who’re more likely to oppose DRM, support libraries and loans, and so on — I see glimmers of the fiction-as-service paradigm. I think this is part of why you’re seeing so many of the strongest advocates of all sorts of new strategies, writers who have actually put them into practice, supporting the agency model and kicking back against the ebook reader outcry. They’re basically denying the service, casting our work as mere extrusion of product and imposing an absolute valuation by the unit. That’s 20th century thinking. Worse, it’s the thinking of the *early* 20th century pulp era that gave us work-for-hire in the comics industry and genre formula hackdom in commercial fiction.

A book comes out as a hardcover. It comes out the same day as an ebook, available not only at Amazon but at Fictionwise, EReader, Barnes & Noble, and other ebook retailers. If it comes out at the same price as the hardcover, with any variations from that price dependent entirely on what the retailer wishes to do in the way of discounting, that’s fine by me. Later, when the book would be issued as a trade or mass market paperback, the ebook price drops to paperback level at all outlets, with any variations from that price etc etc.

As for Amazon’s price break… if a book is available both from Fictionwise and from Amazon, and the FW copy is DRMd ereader priced higher than the Kindle edition, I buy it from Fictionwise because the ereader format DRM is far more user-friendly than the Kindle’s.

Would I like to see DRM die out? Sure. Would I like to see all ebooks priced at 5.99? Sure. And maybe that’ll happen some day, but I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime I’d be happy just to know that if I wanted to purchase a title as an ebook I could do so with or without a lower-than-print-edition price and with DRM (until it dies out) as user-friendly as the ereader format.

I would happily trade the price breaks that so many people think should go with ebook formats for the certainty that any book being published in paper will also be available as an ebook, even if the price is the same as the print edition, and available not just for Amazon’s Kindle but from other stores as well.

Maybe I’m unique in the world of ebook consumers. But I doubt it.

Bests to all,

–tr

The quality of service I’m talking about is quality in fiction terms, not linen versus paper. And that quality comes at a significant cost of time and toil for the writer, and for the editor, copy-editor, proofreader, type-setter, etc..

For the writer: Even a midlist novelist kicking out mid-level entertainment novels is looking at 6 months to a year per book, and that’s not counting the work involved in honing your skills to that approach. A novelist aiming to write something that actually *really* matters to people — they could be looking at five years to a decade. If you have a powerhouse of a writer who can do 3 or 4 books in a year and keep them *good*, that’s a higher quality service in terms of turnover. Me, I’m a slow writer, but I’m aiming to change the whole frickin way you look at the world — which is a really high risk strategy, frankly, cause it plays out in work you either love or hate. Like some beers, yanno. Either way, that’s where the quality of the service mainly lies.

As for the quality on the publisher’s side… Yes, I know there’s a lot of sloppy shit slips through in a lot of books. That’s in part because some big name authors (e.g. Anne Rice) play a “You cannot edit the genius that is ME!!!” game (and are rightly called on it). With midlisters, it’s because service suffers when belts tighten and budgets get cut. Cost-cutting on the finishing during a financial squeeze is a mug’s game on the publisher’s part, but it’s classic (bad) business. It’s like sacking testers to save on costs in a software company. Hell, it actually underlines the amount of work required — by demonstrating the folly of not paying enough to get the work done properly.

Even when it *is* done well… man, my first book has been translated into a whack of languages, and each time the translator has contacted me about *something* that nobody, including myself, has picked up on even after more than a score of us poring over the minutiae of the text word by word, time and time and again. It is *brain-melting* work, worse than debugging spaghetti code in C that was written by an Italian as controller software for an industrial dyeing machine you don’t have the specs for. Trust me, I’ve done the latter, and it’s easier than proofreading a novel. With code you can tell that it’s wrong even if you don’t know where, because it doesn’t run. With prose, it always runs.

Skimp on that and it’s like not cleaning your pipes properly in that bar. It doesn’t matter which tap the beer is flowing from; you’ve given bad quality. It’s like employing a moron with no taste buds to source your beer, and having them not even bother to check the bacteria level. The value of having the right person in place to do those jobs well is real.

The novelty is also quite real, every new book a brand new recipe that’s valued specifically for that. You’d feel ripped off if you picked up a book — however much it cost — and found it was basically just a rehash of someone else’s work. Hell, if it goes far enough in lacking novelty, there are laws against it.

The exception would be pure formula writing honed to a specific marketing category, where the audience is looking for “more of the same” over and over again, and really the quality considerations are… not negligible but different. It’s basic functionality that’s required there not the design innovation the audience is looking for outside formula fiction. You’re talking workmanship rather than craftsmanship. With those workman writers it’s like some microbreweries are producing the same sub-Guinness pseudo-stout over and over again, because they’re aiming for a market that just *wants* the same sub-Guinness pseudo-stout over and over again, with only the *slightest* variation to give it a hint of novelty, to keep it interesting.

But here’s the point: Note that many books published like that *go straight to mass-market paperback*. In other words, the lower-quality, lower-novelty “guest ales” go straight in as regular beers at £2 a pint. With much category fiction the hardback was/is an exception. Often it’s either replaced with a trade paperback (like a £3 guest ale) or done away with entirely.

I’m kind of disappointed that the people calling loudest for new business models, new ways of thinking, are as trapped in an obsolete paradigm as the publishers they’re decrying. Fiction is and always has been really a *service*, with the book as a *ticket* to that service. Reading is using that ticket. You can use the ticket as many times as you want. You can lend it to a friend, sell it on to someone else. (Unlike a gym membership, say.) But there’s zero value in the object itself… except maybe the fact it looks pretty with its little gilded edges. In fact, because what *really* matters is the service you get when you *use* the ticket, you can replace the dead tree with an entirely virtual ticket.

Books have never been valuable because they’re scarce, not outside the antiquities markets, not beyond the interests of collectors who value them as one-off objets d’art (numbers, letters and signatures betokening uniqueness). To be sure, given the industrialisation of production on all levels, including the creative (i.e. in formulaic category fiction,) people were bound to end up seeing creative output in terms of column inches, pages of dead tree, extruded product, but *this* is the lie that ebooks kill stone dead.

Twenty tickets to me on stage going “bibble bibble bibble” have never been more valuable, individually, than twenty thousand tickets to [David Bowie / Carmen / Avatar in 4D / choose your poison] simply because they’re a thousand times more scarce. The value in those tickets relates entirely to the service they give you access to, as becomes crystal clear when the ticket is reduced a pattern of bits that can be stored in any medium whatsoever, with any physical instance of it no more than that — an instantiation.

This is where publishers really have to get with the 21st century, but readers do too. If publishers have spun the whole fiction-as-product to their benefit, readers have swallowed it to the extent that even as they rail against those publishers for their obsolete mentalities, they’re so caught up in the old paradigm themselves that they end up coming across like the worst cafe customer ever, with an utter disregard for the work of those who made that meal and served it to them, insisting that it’s only really worth X bucks because those paper napkins are free.