Interesting blog on e-book pricing

I'm too busy writing to blog much of late--gotta ride that new idea adrenaline while it lasts! But to keep this blog from growing cobwebs, today I'm linking to fantasy author Jim Hines' discussion of e-book pricing. Interesting stuff, more musing and discussion than answers.

For what it's worth, the list price of The Sergeant's Lady, a 94,000-word historical romance, is $5.99, but most retailers offer at least a bit of a discount. If you buy it directly from Carina Press, it's DRM-free and will cost you $5.39. At Amazon it's just $4.69, but you're buying a Kindle edition with DRM.

A comparable mass market paperback historical romance averages around $6.99. To me, that price difference feels about right. When you buy that paperback book, only a small fraction of the cost goes to the production and shipment of the physical object. Most of it goes to the labor of producing the book--all the work the author, editor, cover artist, copy editor, and so on did to take it from a creative gleam in the author's eye to a complete, polished, and packaged story. And when you're buying an e-book from a professional, reputable publisher (like Carina!) or the e-edition of a book that's also in print, those creative labor costs are exactly the same. So I can see discounting e-books by a dollar or two--or, to look at it another way, asking customers to pay a small premium for a paper book to cover printing and shipment--but no more than that, at least not as a regular thing. Promo offers or listing one's backlist for $0.99 to build interest in a new release is another story.

And this post is longer than I intended, so I'll leave it at that for now.

Did I mention that this industry is in flux?

Romance publisher Dorchester is dropping its traditional mass market paperback program and switching to e-book with at least some trade paperback and/or print-on-demand presence.

What I'm hearing from their authors (two of whom are my critique partners Rose Lerner and Alyssa Everett) doesn't quite match the PW story linked above. It sounds as if, at least for now, ALL previously scheduled releases will be released as ebooks on or around their originally planned date, with trade paperback editions coming out six months later.

Ebooks are the future--I don't think anyone doubts that anymore--and at least for popular fiction, the future has arrived. Whether the new business model will work out for Dorchester in particular...well, time will tell. They're moving into it as a struggling company with cash flow issues. I hope they succeed, for the sake of all my friends and critique partners who have contracts with them.

An industry in flux

Everyone knows the publishing industry is a bit chaotic just now. Barnes & Noble is up for sale and e-books are growing at a rapid clip. (But don't ask ME just how fast, or which is in the stronger position out of Apple and Amazon, or even how viable the market is for non-erotic romance e-books like, oh, mine--do I look like I have a crystal ball?)

Fantasy author Jim Hines has a post up addressing some of these changes from a writer's point of view by describing how much has changed about the submissions process since he started writing in 1995. I've only been writing seriously since 2001 and didn't start seeking publication till 2003, so I can report that querying is different than it was even five years ago. Then I sent a lot of paper queries and even manuscripts. Now the vast, VAST majority of editors and agents prefer electronic submissions. A few still ask for paper. Should you bother with them? Speaking for myself, I'll send a paper query to an agent if said agent has a solid web presence and seems tech-savvy, because they're probably avoiding email queries to cut down on the flood of submissions. But if I think there's even the slightest possibility they just don't want to accept change, forgeddaboudit.

I was delighted to switch from Courier to TNR and to replace underlining with italics, but there's no way I'm ever going to break my high school typing class habit of putting two spaces after a period that I learned back in 1989. So I do a find-and-replace just before submitting.

In general, things are changing fast, and while I expect the industry to eventually settle into a New Normal of some kind, it'll take awhile. Don't assume the way you've always done things is still industry standard, especially on things like paper vs. electronic, how to measure word count, preferred fonts, etc. Check your targeted agent or publisher's guidelines and adjust accordingly.