-Tee

-Tee

-Tee

Authors seem to be stuck in the middle. I’m hoping with Amazon’s decision to re-instate MacMillian, that it won’t happen again with another publisher.

But what can I do. I can’t stop technology, I can’t change the cost of publishing, if it was not for conversations like this I would be clueless. So I just sit back and see hope I will not completely lose good black literature because they do not think it will sell in these changing times.

-Tee

-Tee

1. The issue isn’t about trade paperback books. It’s about dynamic pricing, a basic microeconmics term, where product developers (in this case publishing houses) set a price point high enough to be viable in the marketplace that can be teared down through time to a lower final clearance cost. Publishing houses have been asking for a higher price point on ebooks from Amazon for years, but there hadn’t been a strong interest in ebook sales, so publishing houses tabled the discussion for later. With the announcement of the iPad and the fact that DRM isn’t consumer friendly, publishers have decided to start this conversation again. Perhaps if the Nook had a higer price point for their ebooks this efight would have started sooner.

1. The issue isn’t about trade paperback books. It’s about dynamic pricing, a basic microeconmics price point high enough to be viable in the marketplace that can be teared down through time to a lower final clearance fee. Publishing houses have been asking for a higher price point on ebooks from Amazon for years, so publishing houses tabled the discussion for later. With the announcement of the iPad and the fact that DRM isn’t consumer friendly, publishers have decided to start this conversation again.

2. Ebooks cost money to produce. Outside of upfront development costs to pay for the main professionals that produce a book: editor, commercial artist, typesetter, copyeditor, proofreader, marcomm(advertising, pr, etc) you also have to pay someone to convert the book into an automated Ebook version. Amazon uses Kindle, Barnes uses ePub.

People said the same thing about the cost of a single when iTunes came out. Now people spend more than that on ringtones. For authors I would be concerned about Amazon’s plan to have a price ceiling. If it continues, then dynamic pricing will leave little room for Author’s to be paid for their stories. I’m very confident that my daughter will be using an e-reader and an iPad type device as a normal tool, since they use netbooks and kindles now. think five years from now. how much will you as an author make if the ebook price drops to $4 during the holidays like they did this past year? will there be a bigger bite out of your royalty?

For readers–especially lovers of African-American contemporary fiction– you should ask yourself this, what stories will be available to us? Most AA authors can barely make ends meet in the industry as it is now. Authors relationships with publishers rest on our preorder sales and first printing sales numbers, including e-books for hardbacks. If we continue to only support discount bookstores, wholesellers like Amazon and Sams Clubs, then will publishing houses continue to invest in our voices? Will we drive our writers out of the marketplace? Aren’t we shooting our foot to spite our leg?

What I believe all of this means for the future of commercial publishing companies is that they’re going to have to lose a whole lot of arrogance, and start offering more to both readers and writers. For readers, they are going to have to accept the changes that have come with new technologies, and offer a lot of reading material of a diverse nature at reasonable prices. For writers, they are going to have to give writers a better deal, because they no longer hold the whip hand. They are competing now with the rising small-press and e-publishing houses, as well as with the opportunities for self-publishing, and will have to give writers a reason why they should share a portion of their revenues with the publishing house.

Yes, yes, yes! I’m all for authors getting picked up by major publishers and getting paid for their work, but I will never agree with an author just accepting whatever just to be “published”. And, I think many of them should just stand up and say no thanks.

-Tee

The main elements of the B&M business model are: 1) moderate to large print runs, 2) marketing of books to physical bookstores, 3) acceptance of returns by bookstores for refund within an agreed-on window of time. Consequences of this include: 1) pricing that incorporates the built-in inefficiency of accepting returns for refund, 2) low royalties paid to authors because there isn’t a lot of room for generosity in all that (and because publishers hold the whip hand and can get away with it), 3) control of all mainstream publishing by commercial publishing houses because of the expense involved; 4) a limited (and generally short) time for any published book to be considered a “success,” beyond which it’s considered a “failure.”

A different model would work best with even print books marketed on-line, let alone e-books. On-line distribution lends itself to print-on-demand methods rather than mass-printing. Also, there doesn’t need to be any return mechanism built in for the wholesaler/retailer as there does with a physical bookstore. This by itself can allow lowering of prices for books as well as increase of the time-for-success window. With e-books of course that change is even more extreme, because e-book production and storage costs are trivial. It’s possible to profitably market an e-book at a much lower price than a hardcover, or even a paperback (one can find independently published e-books today for as low as 99 cents, and people are actually making money on them).

At the same time, there’s another change on the other end, the relationship between writers and publishers. It’s no longer true that writers have to go through publishing houses in order to publish their work. (Well, it was never true, but it used to cost a lot of money to do it other ways; now it costs nothing.) Nowadays, while it remains true that no writer is guaranteed success, any writer can be published. There’s nothing to it.

What I believe all of this means for the future of commercial publishing companies is that they’re going to have to lose a whole lot of arrogance, and start offering more to both readers and writers. For readers, they are going to have to accept the changes that have come with new technologies, and offer a lot of reading material of a diverse nature at reasonable prices. For writers, they are going to have to give writers a better deal, because they no longer hold the whip hand. They are competing now with the rising small-press and e-publishing houses, as well as with the opportunities for self-publishing, and will have to give writers a reason why they should share a portion of their revenues with the publishing house. A good publishing house can offer editing and marketing that may be well worth giving up a small share of the revenue, but the only way the very small royalties currently offered can possibly be justified is if a writer simply has no alternative, and that’s increasingly not the case.

-Tee