First, thank you for taking the time to investigate my books, and for reporting back.
[ I sell my ebooks for $3 on Amazon and $4 on Smashwords (which distributes to Apple, kobo, diesel, etc). (Why the discrepancy? to tell you the truth, I forget. I think, but am not certain, that there was a reason.) (Amazon gives a much lower royalty on books that sell for less than $2.99, by the way; people who price their ebooks at $.99 instead of $2.99 are gambling that they can sell something like ten times as many books. )] Second, an observation on ebook pricing in general. For the last 3.5 months I've been employed by Zola Books, a new ebook vendor (in limited, private beta now, hoping to be open to the public sometime this fall) that will be competing against Apple, Amazon, Kobo, et al. We expect to have ebooks from all major publishers in the USA and lots of smaller publishers. These books typically sell for $9.99 or more. That once seemed pretty high to me. Now that I appreciate the infrastructural costs of producing quality, curated books in ebook format, I don't think it's all that high, although I don't expect to purchase many $10 ebooks myself, since I have a pretty good stack of unread paper books around. (Moreover my wife is a librarian, I spend a lot of time in libraries, and I'm much more likely to get a book from a library than to purchase it. By a factor of about 50. Fortunately for Zola books, there are millions of people who would rather have their own ebook than take out a library book.) The books I wrote & sell may be cheap, but few people have heard of them and fewer buy them. I'm certainly not making a living as a novelist. I don't have a marketing department and the reading public is largely predisposed to think that my books are crap because they're self-published. Random House, on the other hand, provides benefit to its readers through its curation & editorial functions, and to its writers by validating and marketing functions. That's one reason why their ebooks cost more than mine do. Are those services worth $7/book? Hard to say, but at least some people evidently think so. As to the future of ebooks and ebook pricing, the only thing I feel confident in predicting about the next few years is, "it's going to be interesting." jrs On Aug 25, 2012, at 4:28 AM, Sriram Karra wrote: > I have noticed that kindle editions of your own books are very attractively > priced. A great move, I think. But such deals are clearly hard to discover, > and consequently the whole platform suffers from an image problem.
