Speaking of Joe Konrath, he made a blog post a few days ago stating that as of 9/21/10, his overall e-book sales had topped the 100,000 mark. He is selling over 7,000 e-books per month via Amazon alone, and Amazon represents almost 3/4 of his total e-book sales. He also notes that the poorest-performing e-books are the ones sold through Hyperion, the publisher who still controls the first six books in his Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels mystery series. Averaging out the sales, he estimates he has earned $34 per month per title from these books, compared to the...

With the launch of its UK e-book store, the controversy over Amazon’s pricing has finally jumped the Atlantic. The Bookseller reports that Amazon has priced a number of books at less than £3 ($4.67 at current exchange rates), sparking a price war in which retailer W.H. Smith dropped its own e-book prices drastically, too. [An unnamed] senior publisher attacked the pricing strategies of W H Smith and Amazon. He said: "It’s absolutely absurd to devalue our product but I’m not surprised because our industry is populated by nincompoops." This publisher thinks that the...

Something we apparently missed mentioning in the rush of the other Kindle 3 news is that Amazon has also announced a Kindle e-book store specific to the UK will be launching at the same time as the two new Kindles launch over there, making the UK the only country apart from the US to have a native Kindle e-book store of its very own. The wi-fi and 3G Kindles, $139 and $189 in the USA, will be £109 ($171 at current exchange rates) and £149 ($234) respectively. A bit more expensive than the US, but not the “equal...

Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin weighs in with his (lengthy) thoughts on the Wylie/Amazon book deal, which has quickly become the nine day wonder of the e-publishing world. He summarizes the issue of movement toward e-books as having three key components for publishers: e-book pricing, dominance of sales by a monopoly or oligarchy of big stores, and royalties. Shatzkin notes that the questions of pricing and monopoly have been at the center of attention for the last year, most notably at the beginning of 2010 when Amazon and Macmillan faced off over the Agency Pricing model. But now it’s...

On our sister blog Gadgetell, Sue Walsh wonders when e-readers will hit $99, (inspired by a PC World article also so wondering). But more importantly, she also has some angry words for the publishers who fomented the agency price model, which raised prices from Kindle’s originally-promised $9.99 per e-book to $12.99 or more. That leads me to wonder, what good are falling e-reader prices when the publishers are determined to jack up the price of ebooks? I will never understand why they hate ebooks so much. Everyone I know who has an e-reader says they...

On FutureEBook, Alistair Home has an editorial stating that the publishing industry should learn from the mistakes of the music industry when it comes to pricing e-books. We’ve heard similar statements before from music-exec-turned-author Susan Piver, whose posts I covered here and here, but where Piver focused on big chain stores’ discounting driving mom-and-pop record stores out of business, or the industries’ tendency to look for “hits” at the cost of lesser-selling but more diverse talent, Home looks at suggested retail price, “double-dipping”, and slowness to adapt to change. When the compact disc was launched, Home...

Remember how Apple’s e-book prices were going to be several dollars more expensive than Amazon’s? Alexander Vaughn at AppAdvice has gotten a sneak preview of the iBooks store, including a screenshot that depicts pricing on some of the books. Vaughn notes: Anyway, at the moment, out of the 32 eBooks featured in the New York Time’s Bestsellers section, 27, including the entire top 10 are priced at $9.99. And of the five that are higher, even the highest of them is $12.99—about $4 more than the Kindle version. Of course, this isn’t...

E-book pricing seems to be much in the news today. This morning, NPR has a story on the e-book pricing argument, covering both the standard publishing agency line that e-books should cover publishers’ overhead costs (via publisher Jason Epstein) and the belief that e-books should cost less (via analyst James McQuivey and freelance writer Chris Dannen). It is a quite well-balanced report, laying out the major arguments on both sides. The only drawback is that it does not mention Baen, which makes a great counter-example to the argument that e-books necessarily have to be expensive....

John Sargent of Macmillan has posted a new blog entry, in which he takes a look at four questions that cover the general gamut of the comments he received to his previous one. The first question Sargent addresses is how much an e-book should cost. He takes a look at several differing points of view—it should cost the same as a hardcover, it should cost almost nothing, it should be tethered at just below the price of the cheapest paper form—and concludes: In the end, an e book will be priced to reflect the...

I’ve found some good blog responses to John Sargent’s post about Macmillan’s agency pricing model, which we reprinted the other day. In his Kindle Nation Daily blog, Stephen Windwalker praises Sargent for at last addressing the general public rather than just the industry insiders at whom his earlier entries were pitched—even as he remains critical of Sargent’s message. I had been critical of Sargent previously for addressing his earlier comments only to authors and literary agents, and consequently trying to position them to speak up on his and his company's behalf, and this new...