Independent author John Locke joins Amazon's million-Kindle-seller club
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Independent author John Locke joins Amazon's million-Kindle-seller club
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Re: Independent author John Locke joins Amazon's million-Kindle-seller club
#2> Locke makes less money with his 99-cent gambit than he would selling the same number of books with a traditional publisher.
It's like nobody has ever heard of a supply/demand curve.
Re: Independent author John Locke joins Amazon's million-Kindle-seller club
#3> Locke makes less money with his 99-cent gambit than he would selling the same number of books with a traditional publisher. It's like nobody has ever heard of a supply/demand curve.
Yes, the article is a bit naive on the economics. There is a couple of similar articles that cover it a bit differently from "unknown author sell 1 million" to the direct announcement from Amazon:
http://is.gd/XY8T2y
Re: Independent author John Locke joins Amazon's million-Kindle-seller club
#4This piece is bizarre because the author never once acknowledges that it's possible Locke could not sell a million of his books the conventional way. In other words, the author never acknowledges that Locke may have made less money with a traditional publisher.
Re: Independent author John Locke joins Amazon's million-Kindle-seller club
#5Shockingly naive article. "If he sold one million books at $100 each he would make so much more! What is he thinking?" Uh, maybe no one would buy his books if he charged more? Perhaps he's an intelligent man and has experimented with different prices? Perhaps the author of the article should have asked him?
Re: Independent author John Locke joins Amazon's million-Kindle-seller club
#6>If he sold a million Kindle e-books at 99 cents, he'd clear $346,500 -- nice work if you can get it. But if he were working with a traditional publisher, that $346,500 might be a lot closer to $1 million.
If there's an "if" in every one of your hypothetical sentences, it's probably not an argument worth pursuing.
Re: Independent author John Locke joins Amazon's million-Kindle-seller club
#7> Locke makes less money with his 99-cent gambit than he would selling the same number of books with a traditional publisher. It's like nobody has ever heard of a supply/demand curve.
"Before she became a staff writer at the Times, she was the editor of LAist.com, web producer for the public radio show Marketplace, and a web consultant for the Getty. She is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle."
Agreed.
Re: Independent author John Locke joins Amazon's million-Kindle-seller club
#8This article fails to bring several factors into its economic model. It should be about incentives and demand elasticity here - the "steepness" of the demand curve.
According to the article, he recieves $0.35 from a Kindle sale, and ~$2 from a traditional book sale. In this case, he would need to sell (2/0.35) = 5.7 times as many Kindle books as traditional books to be neutral between the options. To get the equivalent incentive from traditional books, he would need to sell ~175,000 traditional books.
Since he offers both physical and Kindle editions for his books, the question becomes, did ~175,000 customers purchase the Kindle book who normally would have purchased the physical book? Probably not, IMO.
So basically, it sounds like Locke actually knows what he's doing - he's driven by monetary incentives and his arrangement has more-or-less maximized his proceeds.
Re: Independent author John Locke joins Amazon's million-Kindle-seller club
#9Was the author employed by a traditional publisher to discredit the Kindle business model?
Re: Independent author John Locke joins Amazon's million-Kindle-seller club
#10[deleted]