11–20 of 133 posts
Books aren't video games. People don't collect them. I don't consider a game I don't finish to be a failure, a waste of my time. I do so a book. Despite Amazon's talking points, they are relatively price inelastic. Perhaps, right now, they aren't, since people are still dealing with market novelty, but over the long term, time is a bigger sink than money, when it comes to books.
Books aren't video games. People don't collect them. I don't consider a game I don't finish to be a failure, a waste of my time. I do so a book. Despite Amazon's talking points, they are relatively price inelastic. Perhaps, right now, they aren't, since people are still dealing with market novelty, but over the long term, time is a bigger sink than money, when it comes to books.
People do collect books.
I'd bet your average book consumer, with rows and rows of beautiful, trendy, or important books on his shelves, has read maybe 10% of those tomes. If that. 10% is probably a generous figure. Even true bibliophiles have read maybe 25-50% of their books.
There is a long and well-known phenomenon in the publishing world, which I'll call "trophy collecting." It's the process by which someone buys and conspicuously displays popular or well-regarded books on his shelves, mostly for the social esteem of being seen to have them. This is, more or less, how most literary fiction and wonky nonfiction gets sold.
Books aren't video games. People don't collect them. I don't consider a game I don't finish to be a failure, a waste of my time. I do so a book. Despite Amazon's talking points, they are relatively price inelastic. Perhaps, right now, they aren't, since people are still dealing with market novelty, but over the long term, time is a bigger sink than money, when it comes to books.
Ever "follow" someone on social media because you like their writing? Collecting books from an author is like that, except that you're also feeding the author, so they can write more books for you to read. So you get 64,000 words in a book instead of 64 words in a tweet.
A lower starting price increases the initial pool of people who are exposed to an author's fiction or non-fiction worldview. Authors need more input into the price curve which modulates growth of their community of readers. Neither publisher (old boss) nor Amazon (new boss) is maximizing the use of technology to improve relationships between reader-people and writer-people.
For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. That seems like a hard won data point, I'm surprised they threw it out to the public…
"Why not buy this game if it's only $5?"
20 minutes, 10 purchases, and $50 later with another set of titles to stale in the library.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The publishers and record labels are doing the same thing they were before - curation and editing. The book printers & CD burners are out of the mix, but they were never that expensive anyway. There are still fixed costs associated with a book (editor) or an album (studio time), not to mention the marketing costs. Are they worth 35% of the profit? I don't think so. But probably more than 0%. I personally think it sho…
The publisher can always sell directly as an unencrypted EPUB and MOBI (works on Kindle) to the consumer and set their own pricing and percentages.
For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. That seems like a hard won data point, I'm surprised they threw it out to the public…
For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. That seems like a hard won data point, I'm surprised they threw it out to the public…
https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A22DBITFA52H1S
I imagine there's some sort of non-disclosure agreement attached to specific results (which is why I said effectively), but the universe of people that have access is so large (every KDP author), I don't think that matters much in practice - especially for general data points like this one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The publishers and record labels are doing the same thing they were before - curation and editing. The book printers & CD burners are out of the mix, but they were never that expensive anyway. There are still fixed costs associated with a book (editor) or an album (studio time), not to mention the marketing costs. Are they worth 35% of the profit? I don't think so. But probably more than 0%. I personally think it sho…
The publisher can always sell directly as an unencrypted EPUB and MOBI (works on Kindle) to the consumer and set their own pricing and percentages.
http://devblog.avdi.org/2014/04/02/why-does-amazon-hate-eboo...
For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. That seems like a hard won data point, I'm surprised they threw it out to the public…
Is this an implicit admission that Amazon is eating the cost of those returns? Or do they mean something specific like the physical infrastructure for returns?