Just how important is a book’s cover? Well, I’m going to find out. After a tip from Lori Devoti, I decided to try a different cover for the Kindle and Nook editions of THE QUEEN OF CROWS. I was going to add a starburst that read “bonus content included” but going to try this first.
Last weekend we headed down to Chicago for a road trip and I had the chance to sit back and read a full-length novel on the iPad. The experience was pretty interesting, because this was a case where I was simply reading for pleasure.
What I Liked
I enjoyed being able to make the font larger and smaller and change the typeface. For whatever reason, I felt that the larger the text was, the easier the book was to read. I also liked that the book automatically re-calculated the number of pages depending upon whether I held it landscape or portrait, too. I could easily see where I was in the book and how far I had to go. When I needed to pause because I was doing something else, the book automatically opened to where I left off.
The battery life was great, though. I had the iPad on for about 3 hours and I never had an interruption in the actual reading experience.
What I didn’t Like
Just like most vampires, direct sunlight really killed the experience for me. Also, the iPad screen had a nice consistent page-turning smudge from where I was flipping through pages. Yes, I could have “double-tapped” to turn the page, but I preferred actual page turning to that. The screen really made an impact, because it smudged so easily any time the light hit it the wrong way I started to feel like I need to keep cleaning the screen.
The Verdict?
I would use the iPad to view digital comics, because I feel that they actually render better on the device than in print. (You can download free comics and check them out for yourself through DriveThruComics.com.) For trade paperbacks and other books, I would probably use the iPad in a pinch or plan on using it on a trip if I needed to bring several books with me.
If you haven’t heard, there was a bit of an awkward business kerfluffle between Amazon and MacMillan this past weekend. No, I am not talking extensively about it other than to say that I believe we are seeing the result of what happens when people are anxious and start to panic. E-Books are a hot topic, but if history holds true, it will take years before the technology is standardized, affordable, stable, and readily accessible to everyone (including libraries). If you’re curious, Lilith Saint Crow has a lot of information and links on her post entitled, “Good News and Amazonfail Wrap-Up.” I do, however, want to talk about something related to this.
You see, I am concerned. I am concerned about the rampant misinformation and rumors that are circulating around the web whenever anything “happens.” Since Friday, I have heard nothing but questions and confusion when it comes to people’s perceptions about e-books and running a business. People that a) don’t work for an online retailer and b) consume products that they either want for free or at a lower price than what they’re already paying for it.
I am a bit conservative, in that I do not believe in 100 percent transparency with the customer. I feel that readers should not be privy to the inner workings between a retailer (like Amazon) and a publisher (like MacMillan). Why? because the minute you put that deal on the table, the customer is forced to pick a side. That customer isn’t an “informed” customer, because they shouldn’t have to know why things are priced the way that they are. They should, however, have a choice. That choice pretty much comes down to a) yes, I want to buy this product or b) no, I don’t. Their decision should be based on what they want to buy, not who they want to punish (or reward) by buying it.
However, this is the age of “too much” information. Some businesses don’t really have a choice “but” to offer their customers some form of communication because often their customers demand it. When a business doesn’t respond (or doesn’t say the right thing), sometimes customers believe that the entire business is evil. The truth is, most businesses want to paint themselves in a positive light. This is neither “bad” nor “good,” it’s just the nature of how businesses work.
The problem that I have with complete transparency, is that most customers don’t care about the “business” side of this communication, but instead have a pre-formulated opinion based on an “emotional” reaction. That “emotional” reaction often causes a lot of problems, because customers are sharing their reactions with other people as “fact.” We all know how powerful word-of-mouth advertising can be, but sometimes I think we “forget” that it’s easier to distort the truth than it is to spread the facts. Once the misinformation is out in the open, it’s next-to-impossible to try to correct it. And yes, before you say it — I have been guilty of it, too. We all have.
I’m not saying that customers “should care” about the business side of things; what I am saying is that they shouldn’t have to. They should not have to get embroiled in a war between two businesses or be privy to private information, because it takes longer than a single blog post to explain how an entire industry works. Instead, I’d love to see the true victim of these wars — the customer — treated better. Treat them like gold, and they will keep coming back. Treat them like crap, and they will go elsewhere.
Unfortunately, I feel that this will not be the last time we see things like this happen. Sloppy news reporting combined with clicking on whatever appears through search results (regardless of whether it’s factual or not) provides instant access to anything and everything. I know that a lot of writers naturally exercise caution, I just hope that everyone else remembers to do that, too. It’s certainly something that I plan to be even more careful with in the future.
I’ve had a lot of positive feedback from my previous post entitled Weighing in on E-Books, so I wanted to talk about ways to calculate the cost of an e-book.
First, let’s pull some arbitrary numbers. (And by arbitrary, I mean that these are not precise figures.) Let’s say that we paid our author $3,000 for their novel that was 100,000 words in length, which is the equivalent of about 3 cents per word. Then, let’s say we paid an editor a flat rate of $1,250 to edit the novel and an artist $500 for cover art. Add in production costs of $250 to create an e-book, and that gives us a grand total of $5,000 as the sum of the costs for our imaginary publisher.
In order to make up the costs of producing the e-book, we would need to sell a certain amount of copies at a specific price. Say that we priced the e-book at $10.00. If we kept one hundred percent of the revenue, we would need to sell 500 copies of that e-book to make up our costs before we made any money off of the book.
We decided that a retailer, like Amazon, is the best way to offer our e-book for sale. Currently, Amazon takes 65 percent of the cost of the book for all Kindle editions. Recently, they announced that they will lower that rate to thirty percent, but the new rate won’t kick in until June 30, 2010. (Read Amazon ups author royalty for Kindle, matching Apple per CNet.)
Let’s calculate our cost based on the 65% rate, because I think it’s important for you to see how that affects a publisher’s bottom line.
Now, we’d only make $3.50 for every book sold at a price of $10.00. At that rate, we need to sell approximately 1,429 or almost three times the amount of e-books if we took 100% of the revenue to make up our costs. Some retailers take less than 65 percent, but they still take a percentage to offer the book through their store. If you sign up with a One BookShelf site like DriveThruHorror e-books for example, they’ll only take 30 percent. Our profit would now be $7.00 for every e-book sold. So, we need to sell approximately 715 e-books to make up our costs at the $10.00 price rather than 1,429.
Even though we’ve estimated a price based on our costs, we need to think about something else — demand. Is this title only available as an electronic book? Or do we have a hardcover or paperback edition? Will pricing the e-book on sale at $5.99 sell enough copies to warrant the discounted price? How popular is this particular author? The volume of e-books that we need to sell might be different, depending upon any number of additional factors. One issue might come down to the original agreement that a publisher has signed with the author. Unfortunately, there are contracts that pre-date the release of electronic formats so it’s not uncommon to see authors providing a publisher with print rights but not digital or audio rights.
For me, I’m factoring in demand based on the reader’s awareness of my work as an author. Chances are, my soon-to-be-released small press product is not going to sell 1,000 copies at a price of $9.99 within a reasonable amount of time. Because I’m projecting lower sales, I’m lowering the costs of developing my digital product. Instead of paying an editor a thousand dollars, the publisher is offering a direct royalty payment that pays per product sold. We also are reviewing ways to make the product more valuable and attractive to readers by researching different types of graphics and layouts. Still, I needed to come up with two pricing structures; a retail price and a sale price. For me, my e-book price is lower than $9.99 because my costs and the demand for my work are both lower than a mainstream author. Those two things combined also mean that it may take me longer to recoup my costs.
Personally, I have a lot of trouble with people offering e-books at heavily discounted prices or for free, because this devalues the books considerably. What would you think of a print book that’s “on sale” for only ninety-nine cents? It’s original price is only $1.99? To me, this pricing structure seems pretty arbitrary. If your costs were $1,000 and you offered the book through OneBookShelf, you’d still need to sell approximately 720 books to make up that cost. (If your costs were $5,000, you’d need to sell 3,598 copies!!!)
Regardless of whether you self-publish or not, I feel that it’s a smart idea to calculate price based on your costs and your projected sales. By doing that, it can help you set reasonable expectations for your e-book pricing structure and prevent you from losing money over the long haul. Keep in mind, that the biggest mistake I see publishers making, is offering their e-book through a digital retailer like Amazon.com or OneBookShelf, and then “forgetting” about that book. If you want to make up your costs, be sure to include marketing your books — wherever they are being sold — into your plan. Sometimes, you need to make readers aware that you now offer your books in a different format, in order for them to buy those products.
If you’re curious about Amazon’s rates, be sure to visit Amazon.com’s Terms and Conditions or the Terms and Conditions for DriveThruRPG through OneBookShelf. (The Terms and Conditions for the DriveThruRPG site are very similar to the fiction and the comic book sites.)
It’s been really interesting for me to watch the complex discussions about e-books online, because I work for a digital publisher. My company provides digital sheet music files to our customers and there are a lot of similarities between our industry and the publishing industry. However, books have a broader market than sheet music does, in part because more people know how to read text than music.
One of the biggest challenges that I see is two-fold: one, inconsistent pricing models and two, proprietary platforms and formats. E-book pricing is based of a number of different factors that go beyond what a writer, editor and/or publisher earns. First, you have the cost that the e-book retailer charges for every book sold. That charge varies from site to site, but it can comprise as much as forty percent of the book’s value. Second, you have the cost of laying out and creating that digital file in the appropriate formats. Third, you have to pay an artist for cover art and fourth, you have to pay the additional cost of online marketing to get people to buy the book. I believe that publishers have a challenging time coming up with a set price for e-books that people will respond to, because the costs of doing business may be different depending upon the product. Graphics, tables, high page counts and other file format issues can easily tack on more time to the e-book production process.
Unfortunately, these “invisible” costs are not apparent to the reader. Many readers believe that e-books should be less expensive than their paperback or hard cover counterparts, because they assess a different value to the production of a printed book differently than an electronic file. (This is also why I believe piracy is such a huge threat to digital publishers, too.) Part of that assessment is their experience with the internet where information has been “free.”
I’m not sure what the answer is, but I feel that it’s going to be pretty challenging to educate readers on what the production value of an e-book. I don’t feel that being transparent about the cost of doing business for a publisher is the answer, but I also feel that the e-book “evolution” is still in its infancy stages.
As I mentioned earlier, I believe that one of the biggest challenges e-book publishers face is proprietary e-readers and formats. Why? Without having a standardized format that all e-book readers can use for the books they want to read, you’re immediately limiting the market to a select few. I’ve heard many comparisons between e-books and the digital music industry, and while there are similarities, they are still very different. Imaging the cost of archiving these e-books at a library, for example. Now, instead of needing physical space, you need electronic space. Instead of a standardized format that works on all e-readers, you need several different types of readers and several different formats (e.g. duplicates) of the same book.
For the reader, you’ve now increased the cost of being able to read their favorite books. The accessibility of where you can buy a proprietary e-reader, the cost of upgrading them and the cost of maintaining them or replacing files adds in a layer of “cost” to the e-books that wasn’t there before. Now, instead of just buying the books like you would in a physical store, you have to buy the platform and then buy the books, which inflates the cost of whatever e-books you buy. This is also why I believe readers expect that e-books should be cheaper. They aren’t looking at where their money goes, they see it as “I spend $350 on an e-reader and now I have to spend $7.99 on a single book. Why are they so expensive?” As a result, reading a book is no longer available to those who can’t afford the platform to read it on.
In my opinion, copyright restrictions and the threat of digital piracy aren’t the only reasons why the music industry has evolved the way that it did. In part, it’s also because of the volume and the demand. For this reasons and many more, I feel that the e-book “evolution” will not happen overnight. This will be a long process that publishers, retailers, readers, libraries, authors and editors will need to go through. My only hope is that there will be more long-term discussions on how to move toward accessibility to more readers and some standardization.