Answers to some questions from the comments

Hi out there. I have been reading through the traffic from my last post on e-book pricing and the agency model. Rather than answer you all individually, I’ll take a shot at answering four questions that encompass the general nature of the responses.

1) What is the difference between a “hardcover” and “paperback” e book? In truth…nothing. It is simply a matter of timing.

In traditional publishing we had three formats, each at a different price. They were targeted at specific channels of distribution and were released at different times. There was some discounting by retailers, but historically not much. Then discounting became more aggressive and the channels of distribution for the formats began to blur. Currently some books never appear in paperback, some books only appear in paperback, and some books are in the market simultaneously in hardcover and both paperback formats (at three different price points). The digital edition (in almost all cases at present) doesn’t change in format over time – there is no difference in what is actually being sold. So, how should the digital edition be priced?

Some argue it should be almost free as there is little physical cost of delivery. But the physical cost of the book has never been the greatest component of cost. The authors who create the work need their rightful compensation, and they need editors. The marketing and publicity are no cheaper. And given that the ink on paper aspects of the business are still here, publishers still need warehouses, infrastructure, and all the other legacy costs of the business. Digital sales as a whole are not incremental (though some of them may be).

Some argue it should be the same price as the hardcover. After all the real value is in the ideas and the words, not in the artifact that sits on the shelf. But certainly that artifact is of some value, and the digital edition is more ephemeral than a printed book.

Some argue the digital edition should be tethered to the physical book and should be priced under whatever the cheapest available format that is currently available for sale.This has a solid feeling logic behind it, but I’m not sure it makes sense in the long run given there is no differential in format (if there are three formats availble, why wouldn’t the right price be a bit cheaper than the wieghted average of the available formats)?

In the end, an e book will be priced to reflect the value consumers put on it. We believe at first release an e book is worth more and people will pay more for it. Over time it will become worth less as demand tapers. However, some digital books will retain their value over time just like print books. Some will increase their value over time (many physical books are now only available as trade paperbacks, after they have been out in the cheaper mass market formats). So our digital pricing will vary to reflect the value of the book at the time. But in general, our plan is to price books below ten dollars after there initial sales demand slows (usually within a year).

A very long way of saying, there is no hardcover or paperback e book, but the digital edition will change in price over time to reflect its value to the reader as best we can determine it.

2) Will retailers have flexibility to price books at a discount? No, the sale price will be fixed by Macmillan. Retailers will promote and market books, but we will control the price for the book.

3) How can we trust Macmillan to carry out its pricing pledge? An interesting question in that we have never made a pricing pledge. Historically, e book pricing has been driven by a number of factors, and it may well have appeared to be inconsistent. We never promised to price books in a certain way and have actually never controlled retail prices before now. And many of our decisions on list prices were driven more by our Amazon relationship than by our relationship with consumers. Looking forward, it will be a very fast moving world. I have told you our intent on e book pricing. I cannot guarantee or pledge what price we will be charging in the future. Personally I doubt that typical prices for general interest digital books will break out over $15.00. I also believe the majority of digital books will be priced below $10.00, as most Macmillan books are now and will be on day one of the agency model.

4) Will we be re-pricing e books that have a $14.00 digital list price while there is a mass market paperback edition available? Yes! To a customer price of $9.99 or below.

John Sargent

More next week, including author royalties…

Thanks for listening and writing in your concerns.

With a thirty-five year career as a professor of physics behind him, James C. Glass launched a full time writing career in 1999. One of his proudest achievements is the Shanji trilogy. E-Reads has published two of them including the first, Shanji, as well as The Creators.

On the planet Shanji, a ruthless Emperor rules a subjugated people. Kati, raised by the lower caste Tumatsin, is taken captive by the Emperor’s troops, but saved by The Searchers, who see her as the promised Empress of Light who can control the hot light of creation. But Kati’s psychic powers can destroy a planet or star, and could be beyond everyone’s control. She must decide how to use her powers when there is a planetary invasion from afar, led by a powerful Empress Kati thought was her friend and teacher. The barbarian girl must take charge of her own destiny, not only for herself but for Shanji and its neighboring worlds. Born with the heritage of two races, she must rule both of them.

In The Creators, the culminating book of the stunning SF trilogy that began with Shanji and Empress of Light, takes to its conclusion the tale of three generations of Creators. Kati, the light-wielding genetic changeling who saved her planet and became its empress, is now threatened with assassination. Yesui, the daughter who came to control mass as well as light, faces revolution and learns the uses of diplomacy. And Bao and Shaan, Yesui’s twin daughters, take the lineage to its limit. Leaving our universe behind, they spin forth a radiant new creation.

Okay, hotshot, so you want to be an e-book publisher? Piece of cake. All you have to do is provide your retailers with the following information about your books:

• eISBN
• Title
• Contributors
• Description
• Publisher
• Language
• Territorial Rights with Country Code
• Suggested Retail Price with country code
• Publication Date
• BISAC Code

Collectively, this information is known as Metadata, and unless you provide it for every title and in a format that is usable by retailers, the stores will not carry your e-books. And every retailer has its own format requirements. But wait, I’m just getting started.

Take the simple matter of book titles. What is your retailer’s policy about designating titles? Does it prefer “The Grapes of Wrath” Or “Grapes of Wrath, The“? And how about the byline? “John Steinbeck”? Or “Steinbeck, John”?

Or take suggested retail price. Which currency are we talking about? US dollars? Canadian dollars? Australian dollars? British Pounds? And do you know the Country Code associated with the currency?

Then there’s the matter of territorial rights. There’s a code for every country in which you have the right to sell your books. Do you know the country code for Lesotho? Cameroon? Mozambique? How about the USA? Canada?

You’ll need a 13-digit eISBN for each and every e-book. Do you have them? Know where to get them? Are they free or do you have to buy them?

And of course you’ll need BISAC codes, the numbered subject headings organized to help retailers display books by topic. Are you publishing a fantasy? What kind of fantasy? Contemporary (FIC009010)? Historical (FIC009030)? Paranormal (FIC009050)? (You can read all about BISAC Codes here.)

What about your covers? What’s the retailers convention for image files, .png or .jpg? What’s the minimum pixels per square inch? Minimum width in pixels?

There’s lots more, pages and pages of definitions, specs and tolerances in fine print provided by each retailer.

Still think any bozo can become an e-publisher? Do your Metadata homework and get back to me.

Richard Curtis

Amazon has neutered the Buy buttons for all comic book and graphic novel publishers distributed by Diamond Comics Distributors, according to Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly. But this is not a trade dispute like Amazon vs. Macmillan, but rather “an effort to correct the glitch that caused the wild discounting of graphic novels on Amazon.com,” writes Reid, who adds that “there has been speculation that the glitch was caused by Diamond.”

Frozen in time, space and commerce are such leaders as Marvel, IDW, Dark Horse, Archaia, Image Comics, and Top Shelf. Reid explains that “Amazon has to do an audit to figure out which customers got books and at what prices.”

When will the buttons be turned on again? It will take a superhero who can see into the future. “There is no timetable for when this will be completed,” one source was quoted in Reid’s news story.

Pictured is a sculpture by Mark Newman of Bobby Darke, a.k.a. Iceman, one of the original members of Professor Charles Xavier’s X-Men. Bobby Drake (a.k.a. Iceman).

RC

Tag – You’re it!

That’s the banner that Hank St. James’s brandishes as he hurtles into battle with a book pirate. Only that’s not what he calls them. His name for them is “parasites”.

St. James is a piracy exterminator for hire. For a fee he monitors pirate sites and when he finds a client’s book on one he emails a takedown notice to the bad guys. “Sometimes this entails as many as nine emails to get one book taken down from one site,” he informs me. “They use some sites where they upload too and that site then re-ups to seven or eight other sites automatically.”

He claims a high success rate, about 98% getting links removed within 1-3 days. “I’ve cracked most of the larger ones,” he says.

Like anyone else in the law enforcement field, St. James’s job is fraught with danger. “I have been threatened by one clown in Holland connected with [an underground website] when we had a five day running battle to get one of my authors works removed from his site. I’ve picked up viruses from some sites which my software has caught. Fifteen of those viruses are in quarantine, however, as there apparently is no antidote for the strains that infected my computer. So, the virus software simply isolated the virus.”

Is Pirate Sinker cool and dispassionate? Hardly. “It is very frustrating, anger inducing work,” he says. “Recently, John Simpson had a new book come out and that same day it was on [another underground website] which kinda sent me into a blue rage. These shoplifting parasites have no shame.”

For more information you can reach him at piratesinker@gmail.com .

A number of publishers and organizations like Associated Press and The Financial Times have turned to a company called Attributor. Though not as dashing and glamorous as Pirate Sinker, Attributor boasts solid and respectable chops. “Attributor’s FairShare Guardian is the world’s first web-wide monitoring and enforcement platform,” says the company’s website. One of the its customers is Hachette, publisher of such imprints as Little, Brown and Grand Central Publishing. (See Hachette Hires Anti-Piracy Hammer.)

Richard Curtis

If you’re under the impression that vooks, the book/video hybrid, are the e-book equivalent of a garage band, check out John Makinson’s vision for them. Makinson is CEO of Penguin Group, a company that reserves its garage for executive limos. Makinson recently demonstrated before a London conference how his company’s books could spread their digital wings on the iPad. See a video below.

Penguin “will be embedding streaming audio, video and gaming into everything that we do,” he told the conferees. “We’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications.”

Which means they are forsaking epub, which “is designed for narrative text but not this cool stuff that we’re talking about now” and “for the time being at least we’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications.”

When an august publishing personage like John Makinson starts talking about “cool stuff,” you know the revolution has seized the mainstream.

For more about vooks, read If They Asked Me, I Could Write a…Vook?, and for more about ePub, check out What is ePub and Why It’s Important to You?

RC

Until now, most folks returning from the annual Tools of Change conference have come away inspired and energized as the flint of old thinking met the steel of innovation. But this time publishing industry blogger Don Linn reported symptoms of future weariness. “We are in the midst of a bucketload of ‘Future of Publishing’ conferences and there is an element of conference fatigue setting in,” he writes. “There’s not much new under the sun: In the 2 1/2 days I was there, I didn’t see or hear anything startling or revolutionary that hasn’t been discussed in other conferences or even at previous TOC’s.”

His weltschmerz may be shared by others who attended the Digital Book World Conference in January, TOC in February, and face an intimidating gauntlet of convocations celebrating the future. Their common theme is that the future has arrived.

Well, if the future has arrived, can we get a discount on our registration fees? They’re really starting to pile up.

Here’s Linn’s analysis which, in all seriousness, offers some cogent takeaways.

Richard Curtis

This is Read an eBook Week, with thousands of titles available at no cost, offered by many publishers in the hopes of attracting permanent devotees of downloads. E-Reads is a participant with a Warren Murphy “Destroyer” adventure and a Highlands historical romance by Hannah Howell. If the spike in visits to our website is any indicator, thousands of bargain hunters are endorsing the program. There is no better bargain than gratis.

Smashwords founder and blogger Mark Coker has interviewed Rita Toews, whose brainstorm seven years ago led to this annual tradition. “I hope to introduce electronic books to people who have been skeptical about them in the past,” she tells Coker on Huffington Post. “I also hope to give Joe and Jane E. Author a place to get their writing noticed. Now that the traditional publishing houses have shown an interest in e-books it is hard for the unrecognized author to spread the word about their books.”

RC

When the publishers of #1 bestselling hardcover Game Change windowed the e-book edition rather than issue it simultaneously, Kindle owners protested by deliberately downgrading the book in their Amazon reviews. Their action, which fell somewhere between populist revolt and temper tantrum, elicited an editorial by Publishers Lunch’s Michael Cader urging publishers to do a better job educating the public. “Publishing people who care about these pricing discussions need to get in the online forums and start issuing press releases and find other ways to address readers honestly about price,” he said. We agreed with him.

We’ve changed our minds.

What made us change our minds was the confrontation between Cablevision and ABC over how much the cable provider should pay ABC to carry its programs. Held as hostage was the Academy Awards, one of the most watched shows on the annual television calendar.

The reaction of subscribers was identical to that of Kindle owners deprived of Game Change. They didn’t understand the issues, nor did they give a damn who was in the wrong. They wanted their Academy Awards, and they wanted them now. Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, said this about the blackout: “When pulling a signal becomes the nuclear option in negotiation, it inflicts collateral damage on consumers who pay their bills and have done nothing wrong. Someone needs to be speaking up for them in this dispute and those like them, and make no mistake, this is the latest example of consumers getting caught in the middle because the high stakes incentives created in these negotiations are not working for the average customer who just expects their programming to be there when they want it.”

Fortunately for the average customer, the dispute was settled in time. (Actually about 18 minutes late, occasioning the wry observation by New York Magazine‘s blogger that subscribers blessedly missed the egg laid by co-hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.)

The moral of Cablevision vs. ABC as far as the publishing industry is concerned is that consumers have no patience for such arcane issues as windowing, loss leader pricing or agency business models. They expect their book when they hit Download and they want it at a reasonable price. Educational initiatives are a waste of time. We need to get our pricing act together. Though there is no Academy Awards show to bring us to the brink of catastrophe, the e-book industry will not realize its full potential until we provide our products reliably and at prices that makes sense to customers.

Richard Curtis

To help promote E-Book Week (March 7-13th), E-Reads is making two of our favorite books available as free downloads in PDF format, exclusively from our website and for one week only!* We know you’ll love these two titles and come back to read more titles available from E-Reads. So, enjoy! [PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS OFFER ENDED MARCH 13]

Highland Hearts by Hannah Howell (Romance)

A villainous rogue abducts Contessa Tess from her uncle’s castle in the Scottish highlands, and when he reveals her uncle’s terrifying plans, she follows him into a whirlwind of adventure and realizes that there is a hero beneath his criminal facade. (This title and others are also available in other e-book formats and paperback by Hannah Howell at E-Reads.)

To download PDF, click here.

Ship of Death (Destroyer 28) by

Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir (Action/Adventure)

Beware Greeks bearing gifts – especially when it’s billionaire Demosthenes Skouratis selling the biggest pleasure cruise ship ever built to the United Nations for their headquarters. CHEAP! Over three times the size of the QE II, this huge vessel has everything from high tech offices and communications equipment to luxury spas, casinos, restaurants and palatial apartments. But the deal doesn’t include a dozen dead bodies and a hull full of bombs being rigged to explode the night of the opening gala! And Remo Williams, the Destroyer, plans to crash the party. Tipped off the plot when CURE director Harry Smith is getting beaten up by some tough crew members, Remo and Sinanju master Chiun blast full steam ahead, drowning the sleazy rats and save the UN from a watery grave. (This title and others are also available in other e-book formats and paperback by Warren Murphy at E-Reads.)

To download PDF, click here.

To learn more about E-Book Week, visit the website ebookweek.com to find other special promotions by E-Book publishers.

* Terms of Service: These two titles are available for free to end-users only when downloaded from E-Reads.com. All distribution rights are reserved and they must not be redistributed in any way or form. Please do not link directly to these PDF files.