Ah the Kindle Community. I love them, but, my brothers and sisters in the digital evolution can get impassioned first, and stop to think second at times. For quite some time there were many many folks on the boards that insisted that Amazon had promised that no ebooks would be over $9.99. Um...no. They were quite good at wording it that they would make available NYT Bestsellers at that artificially low price. (And if I recall the wording in that was still kinda slippery so that they didn't necessarily have to but that they would try
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Excellent point! I tend to forget audio and large print because those are generally lower in sales, barely a blip on the market.
Large print in particular is really a hard sell. Virtually every novel or nonfiction trade book will be made into an e-edition, but only a tiny, tiny fraction of books get made into large print editions. The costs are too high (bigger print = more pages) and the print runs too low.
I think of audio as a different thing. Are audiobooks sold as downloads considerably cheaper than audiobooks sold as CDs? A quick perusal of online vendors seems to suggest they are not.
Does ReadHowYouWant do sublicensing agreements with publishers, or do they aggregate large print books the publishers themselves put out? The note on the left side regarding multiple choices for font seems to imply RHYW does the publishing themselves.
When I worked at a trade house, I handled large print books. We had a standard design for all of them, which conformed to the NAVH guidelines.
Macmillan's dynamic pricing
anonymous
February 4 2010, 00:34:44 UTC
I agree that people who suggest some kind of conspiracy theory about publishers wanting to kill ebook format are just bat-shit crazy, as I don't suppose any publisher is interested in being out of one of the few markets in which book sales should increase. But it's not like Macmillan's been nice to the ebook market, and by extension to this market's customers, few as they might be
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Re: Macmillan's dynamic pricingrobotech_masterFebruary 4 2010, 04:15:32 UTC
Given how Macmillan has mishandled "dynamic pricing" at Fictionwise over the ten years it has had to get it right, it is easy to understand how and why people are afraid that the leopard has not changed his shorts.
And as I said above, a ten-year pattern of willful cluelessness can look an awful lot like malice aforethought from the right perspective.
I'm one of the writers under the Macmillan umbrella whose books are not being sold by Amazon. Since last Friday, when they disabled the "buy" icon, I ceased getting royalties through sales of new books--including Kindle editions
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You're aware that under the agency model, your publisher is actually taking in less money per book, right?
Taking the hypothetical example of a $26 book, Amazon pays $13 to the publisher, then sells it at $9.99, losing $3. Your share of royalties is (from what I've heard) supposed to be calculated as a percentage of either the wholesale price or the cover price.
(I've heard some claim it's supposed to be a percentage of the final sale price, but that doesn't make sense to me-Amazon's paying the publisher the same amount of money wholesale either way; why should the publisher get to keep more money if Amazon marks it down?)
But if Macmillan sells it at $15 via the 70/30 Agency model, they only take in 7/10 of $15, or $10.50. So whether it's the wholesale price ($10.50 vs. $13) or the cover price ($15 vs. $26), assuming your percentage of the take is the same you're still getting less per e-book.
And since the price will be higher, Amazon will be selling fewer e-books, too.
Publisher, maybe. Author royalties, very unclear. I’ve been seeing this spread-sheeted using actual contract language and it’s actually pretty murky. Further, Macmillan is simultaneously talking about increasing its royalty percentages on e-editions of its books back up to 25% and possibly higher, in no small part due to what is going on with its plans for the new pricing model: http://www.authorsguild.org/advocacy/articles/macmillan-e-royalties-at.html So it looks like this will actually result in higher author revenue on a per-book basis.
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Large print in particular is really a hard sell. Virtually every novel or nonfiction trade book will be made into an e-edition, but only a tiny, tiny fraction of books get made into large print editions. The costs are too high (bigger print = more pages) and the print runs too low.
I think of audio as a different thing. Are audiobooks sold as downloads considerably cheaper than audiobooks sold as CDs? A quick perusal of online vendors seems to suggest they are not.
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When I worked at a trade house, I handled large print books. We had a standard design for all of them, which conformed to the NAVH guidelines.
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And as I said above, a ten-year pattern of willful cluelessness can look an awful lot like malice aforethought from the right perspective.
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Taking the hypothetical example of a $26 book, Amazon pays $13 to the publisher, then sells it at $9.99, losing $3. Your share of royalties is (from what I've heard) supposed to be calculated as a percentage of either the wholesale price or the cover price.
(I've heard some claim it's supposed to be a percentage of the final sale price, but that doesn't make sense to me-Amazon's paying the publisher the same amount of money wholesale either way; why should the publisher get to keep more money if Amazon marks it down?)
But if Macmillan sells it at $15 via the 70/30 Agency model, they only take in 7/10 of $15, or $10.50. So whether it's the wholesale price ($10.50 vs. $13) or the cover price ($15 vs. $26), assuming your percentage of the take is the same you're still getting less per e-book.
And since the price will be higher, Amazon will be selling fewer e-books, too.
How's this supposed to help you, again?
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True.
My only question is: How can Amazon list a book if there is no price agreement between them and the publisher?
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