SB Sarah weighs in -- and a bunch of commenters, too

[walkitout]

http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/index.php/weblog/comments/brand-loyalty-and-book-loyalty/

SB Sarah opines on the Macmillan/Amazon showdown (her term), and I got the shock of my middle-aged life. I _had_ firmly believed that people-who-read-a-lot (defined as 2+ books a week for these purposes) notice publishers and, over time, will use knowledge of publishers as a way to find more books they might like and/or to tie-break when debating between a couple of choices. I don't _think_ I'm talking out of turn to say that when I started worked at that bookstore that the single most requested search feature was a search-by-publisher. I thought the request was eminently reasonable; just about everyone else working there (a very short list at the time) was confused -- they didn't pay attention to publisher when looking for reading material. But then, they didn't read a lot.

A bunch of the usual stupidity runs through the comments, but the shocker was that romance readers as a class completely ignore publisher, with a short list of exceptions. (1) Tor Romance apparently really pissed off a bunch of readers. (2) Romance readers who are _also_ SF/F readers do pay attention to publishers (because SF/F readers live and breathe by their imprint -- one of the things I did early on in The Recent Excitement was go check out what PNH had to say on the subject, partly because he's usually pretty reasonable, and partly because he is the soul of Tor. I was not, I might add, particularly impressed by what little I found by him on the topic.). (3) People buying a lot of epublished stuff (EC and the like) are forced to pay attention.

dunnettreader (at the end when I read the comments) has some of the best commentary. I don't necessarily agree that in the long run, the agency model will reduce ebook sales -- but I'm inclined to agree it will slow adoption down slightly in the medium term thus reducing pressure on producers and sellers of physical books. Whether that's a good or bad thing is legitimately debatable. Fast transitions can do some damage -- but they can ultimately save a lot of people a lot of money. Slow transitions give people time to adjust, but they often wind up forcing everyone to pay two and three times what they might otherwise have had to pay, as they limp along with a foot in two worlds, while holding on for dear life to a third.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I pay attention to publisher part of the time, and part of the time I don't. It's pretty much like clothing brands. If I have to order online, then yeah, I have to know whether I like Lands' End clothing or not, but if I'm shopping at Sears (or Value Village), I try on this or that and I may not notice at first that I've picked out something that says Lands' End on it. And there are all kinds of clothing brands whose names I remember in a vague way but can't remember what I think of them.

It just occurred to me: does there exist an accent in which DAW and Tor are homonyms? Must be confusing for SF readers if so.

I have been thinking that maybe it would be a good thing if the author got the SAME fee on ANY version of the book, hardcover, softcover, e-book, discounted-but-not-remaindered, whatever. Then authors could regard the format wars with a little more equanimity, rather than feeling that their pockets were being picked every time a format got cheaper. But maybe someone else has already thought this through and it's a really dumb idea. Goodness knows I've been slapped down more than once for thinking there can't be much of a marginal cost for adding an e-book edition to a print edition (apparently it's making sure that font changes don't render the book a total display mess that takes a bunch of time=money -- cranking out a PDF version or something wouldn't be a problem, but people naturally want more than that).

marginal cost of adding e-books

[walkitout]

I don't have anywhere near the data (and probably could never get it, either, and if I did, I probably would have had to sign a contract not to let anyone else know any derivative details, thus doing me No Good Whatsoever) to figure this out, but I suspect the largest marginal cost of adding ebooks is that if the ebooks actually find a market, that market is cannibalized from the market that the print books are depending upon, rendering print books more expensive as a result of increased risk/unpredictability. Basically, if you add ebooks, and more people buy them than you expected and fewer people buy print books than you expected, you have to pulp/lose money on the print books. I think that is, in fact, the big cost driver here. Once we're through the transition, it'll be cheaper all around, because they will once again have predictability on the print side.

Re: marginal cost of adding e-books

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Right, but strictly speaking that's in some different economic category, isn't it? There must be a more limited term (you probably went into this in the other post) that's strictly about the total cost of producing print book + e-book being editorial/print/distribution cost plus x, so the marginal cost is x. How you go about *recouping* those costs then becomes different once you're marketing both versions at once, due to the possible cannibalization.

The whole return policy thing on printed books (stores returning books that don't sell, I mean) is more than a bit weird, anyway. Can't think of any other industry that works in such a way.

Re: marginal cost of adding e-books

[walkitout]

I certainly am not claiming to know the correct names for any of these things. The observation I am making is that if you make print books for a while, and then add e-books, you incur a cost on the _print_ side of increased returns/increased unpredictability of how many will sell vs. be returned.

There's also this idea that you have the electronic file you used to send to your printing presses; why does it cost much/anything to make that readable on an e-reader or whatever? The answer to that would lie, as I think you noted, in font selection, and also making sure it doesn't look absolutely unreadably bad on at least some of the high probability readers in some of the most likely font sizes. Given the number of people complaining about formatting, I think this might be slightly harder to do well than it appears to be.

As for the return policy thing, I think that's actually how non-perishable retail worked in general, until after WW2. However, this is now getting kinda far away from my limited expertise.

Re: marginal cost of adding e-books

[rolandgo.livejournal.com]

I've got no data on the fixed cost of adding an ebook title.
If forced to make a guess, I'd say between $100 and $2000
for something that's mostly text.
There have been several mentions of Amazon's fulfillment costs
on the Kindle. It looks as if the whole thing runs six cents
per title (including Whisper Net charges).

Re: marginal cost of adding e-books

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

http://www.xconomy.com/national/2010/02/05/kindle-conniptions-how-i-published-my-first-e-book/

"I’m a geek who is comfortable with, though not totally fluent in, HTML, and this project severely tested my patience. I spent an estimated 10 hours trying to figure out how to do this, and then another 30 or 40 hours doing the grunt work to make it happen. So I think it’s safe to say that until somebody comes up with a way to automate e-book production, we won’t see a huge flood of authors self-publishing for the Kindle or the other e-book platforms. Perhaps I should have hired a consultant. Tallent charges a reasonable $60 per hour, and says he can convert a typical novel to Kindle-ready HTML in 1 to 3 hours and a longer non-fiction title in 3 to 6 hours. But then I wouldn’t have had this wonderful story to tell."

If people are really going to pay $60 an hour for this kind of thing, I bet I should learn to do it. It can't possibly be harder than copy editing (famous last words).

Re: marginal cost of adding e-books

[walkitout]

Okay, I read that overly-long blog post, but I didn't understand it. Why did he put that thing in Word in the first place? He should have used a text editor and done it by hand. Anyone who has visited my website knows exactly what I'm talking about. ;-)

Re: marginal cost of adding e-books

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Clearly he didn't know what he was doing, which was sort of his point. But assuming the consultant does, 1 to 6 hours of work may indeed be about what it takes to get the file of a book Kindle-ready. And all other things being equal, in the current environment one's most likely starting from a Word document. (Most authors would go all deer-in-the-headlights on you and say, "But isn't Word a text editor? It edits text, right?")

Re: marginal cost of adding e-books

[walkitout]

*snicker* I laughed really hard at that, and then sobered up when I realized just how many people I couldn't explain that to. *sigh*

If you decide to make an experiment of this, I've got a couple NaNoWriMo novels I periodically contemplate kindle-izing. I'd be more than happy to pay you for 6 hours at $60/hour to kindle-ize one of them, if you want to get paid for part of the time it takes to figure it out. FWIW, both novels are on google docs, but they got imported there from two different sources.

Re: marginal cost of adding e-books

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

That's a lovely offer, thank you. I doubt I will get around to studying Kindle formatting seriously for a bit, though (especially considering how little I know about HTML to start with). I have been thinking about putting my mother's books on Lulu or someplace, though, and it might make sense to have Kindle versions available. Hmmm.