The collective insanity of the publishing industry

The flooding already happened. There was a gold rush a few years ago when anyone who had any interest in writing slapped together an ebook and put it online.

Some of those authors did incredibly well for a year or two, then the market became saturated.

So there was a shake out. Authors who understand business - marketing, leads, keeping a mailing list, and running a blog that provides value - are doing somewhere between "ok, I guess" and "still earning well."

The opportunists and not-so-greats and other amateurs have given up and run away.

Now, the market for indies is stronger than it was - because as the post says, trad pub has strangled its own market share. And this is excellent for indies.

* Contrary to popular belief, physical production is NOT the single largest part of a book's cost. In fact, even before ebooks, the cost of paper and ink and shipping was actually a pretty negligible part of the final cost.

Most of the cost of a book is the highly-skilled labor involved (writing, editing, copyediting, proofreading, designing, typesetting, marketing, selling) and these critically don't go away or even get much cheaper in an electronic world. Even ebooks need specialized design and typesetting, and I have some examples which did not get that love which will make your eyes bleed if you don't believe me.

Salaries in publishing have for decades been nosing around the minimum the market will bear---as just one example, freelance proofreaders get paid a penny per word; the good ones get two. Many freelance proofreaders are also editors, copyeditors, and authors in their own right, and hustle their asses off to make incomes that, coming from tech, we wouldn't consider starvation wages.

* Price is an important signalling mechanism, and so---given the costs of book production---it's important to the publishers not to drive the perceived fair cost of books down below, no matter whether Amazon is currently subsidizing that or not.

I think this is the number one reason. The issue is that the prices are too high for perceived value.

I buy a fair number of non-fiction books and loved when ebooks emerged as a viable way to buy a book at what I perceived to be a reasonable price. Now that the agency model has been in force I've just shifted how I buy ... I buy used books from Amazon.

All the books I used to buy as ebooks the publisher was receiving revenue. Now, they don't receive any money from my purchases.

The book publishing industry still has a window of opportunity to transition to ebooks under their own direction, but it's almost closed. See the recording industry.

When a physical object that has to be manufactured and shipped costs more than a text file, I feel ripped off. Especially since I can lend a physical book to someone or sell it to a local used book store, neither of which I can do with an ebook.