Daily Archives: December 30, 2011

THE answer to the $m question is we are only guessing how much you should pay as a fair price for an eBook.
 I will try to lay out the arguments as simply as I can. Please feel free to express a different perspective.
First I presume you as a reader want to pay as little as possible for eBooks while contributing to a reasonable income for a good author.
As it stands at the moment, most of the world’s good authors live close to the poverty line unless they can attain income supplementary to their books.
If they are under contract to one of the Big Six publishers their eBook royalties of 17 1/2 % is about double their hard copy royalties. But the prices of eBooks are two-thirds or less than hard copy.
These authors along with their publishers would like to see their eBooks as priced as high as possible.
At tghe other end of the scale you have self-published authors such as Joe Kronath making a more than comfortable living selling mystery and horror novels at $3.99.
Joe has sold truckloads of books, approaching a million copies. If you read his blogs as many do, you will finf Joe has worked his butt off to produce and sell these books.
Most of the world’s good authors have not Joe’s personality, stamina  or affinity for marketing. By all means, buy Joe’s books at $3.99 but don’t think you can can keep mist good authors gainfully employed at $3.99 a pop.
Another point about Joe and other successful self-publishers is they are mostly novelist. Novels are the easiest to format for the world’s eReaders. Joe says  takes him an hour.
For my collection of interactive Gonzoid raves 7 Shouts, I cannot do it. I have to produce two versions, one as a PDF with all its cute photos and another, stripped of photos but retaining beaut links which you cannot  access on static PDF.
While we can celebrate NOT ANOTHER BLOODY COOKBOOK dominating eBooks, the geeks need to improve the  eBook technology before we can attain the precious diversity of print books while enhancing the new gift of interactivity. NEXT TIME: Amazons and Authors. What do they think?