eBook Pricing For What It’s Worth
January 30, 2008
One of the noted customer complaints lately has been ePublisher’s pricing coming closer to the amount paid for paperbacks. I wanted to take a quick look today at current eBook pricing. As you know, each publisher has it’s own standards and classifications as far as book length and pricing so here we will state what is currently on the shelf and give a general idea what the different publishers are asking as far as price goes.
- Quickie: up to 15,000 words $2.99
- Novella: 15,000-29,999 words $4.45
- Short Novel: 30,000-44,999 words $5.20
- Novel: 45,001-69,999 words $5.95
- Plus Plus Novel: 100,000+ words $7.99
- Fling: less than 20,000 words $3.99
- Novella: between 20,000-30,000 words $4.99
- Novel: 30,000+ words $5.99 - $6.99
- Novel Plus: ? words $7.99
- Short Stories: 12,000-18,000 words $2.50
- Novellas: 18,001-35,000 words $3.50
- Category: 35,001-60,000 words $4.50
- Novel: 60,001-100,000 words $5.50
- Plus Novel: 100,000+ words $6.50
- Amber Brief: 2,500-4,999 words $2.00
- Amber Kiss: 5,000-10,000 words $3.00
- Extended Amber Kiss: 11,000-17,000 words $4.00
- Novella: 18,000-29,000 words $5.00
- Extended Novella: 30,000-40,000 words $6.00
- Novel: 41,000-70,000 words $7.00
- Extended Novel: 71,000+ Words $8.00
- Quick Silvers: 20,000-25,000 words $4.50 - $4.75
- Novella: 25, 000-45,000 words $5.25 - $5.75
- Full Length: 45,000-80,000 words $5.95
- Plus Novel: 80,000+ words $6.10
- Harlequin Blaze 55,000–60,000 words print $4.99 / eBook $4.50
- Harlequin Historical 70,000–75,000 words print $5.99 / eBook $4.95
- Harlequin Superromance 60,000–65,000 words print $5.50 / eBook $4.95
- HQN Books 100,000–150,000 words print $7.99 / eBook $6.30
- Silhouette Nocturne 70,000–75,000 words print $5.25 / eBook $4.75
- Silhouette Special Edition 55,000–60,000 words print $4.99 / eBook $4.50
Signet
- 6.6 inches Falcon Moon by Cassie Edwards 72,620 words print $7.99 / eBook $7.99
- 6.7 inches A Perfect Gentleman by Barbara Metzger 99,435 words print $6.99 / eBook $6.99
Berkley
- 6.6 inches Spymaster’s Lady by Joanna Bourne 112,605 words print $7.99 / eBook $7.99
- 8.2 inches Nauti Nights by Lora Leigh 97,751 words print $10.20 / eBook $15.00
In summary it still looks like the best pricing in both eBook format and print is at eHarlequin.
I think that ePublishers need to be especially careful of setting prices approaching those of print books since print will always be seen as the preferred format of more value than eBooks. Their pricing baselines need to be in line even at the eBook level with the pricing of the bigger publishing houses or they need to provide something completely different or of better quality than typically offered in paperback in order to not be seen unfavorably in a comparison.
Following a eHarlequin pricing model would be preferable than losing customers or deterring customers from taking a chance on new authors you are trying to introduce.
Tags: eAuthors, eBooks, ePublishers, pricing
You missed the single title imprints at Eharlequin. I don’t know what the hardcovers sell for, but I think my Spice titles (which are anywhere from 100K to 130K same as my Elloras ) go for ten something.
Sarah
I wanted to go with a few of eHarliquin’s main lines that were close in word count to what the ePublishers typically put out.
Otherwise their list is way too long.
Ellora’s Cave still does not fair very well in that regard. They are not offering a better product. Their editing noticeably sucks.
In fact they were the ones most complained about when this topic came up. Customers remarked they used to spend over $100.00 a month on Ellora’s Cave and now they rarely check the latest offerings.
Hi Teddy, de-lurking here but I simply couldn’t resist.
I started reading romance during my student days when I was on a very tight budget and bought most of my books used or got them through bookmooch. I also discovered ebooks back then and I tried to request as many as possible for review because I was simply not able to afford them. Nowadays I am not very often tempted by ebooks, I have become a wee bit jaded it seems *g*, however, because of a busy schedule or moody reading tastes I find myself unable to request the ebook (the one that appeals) in the month of its appearance and for we only present new releases I would be forced to buy it later on.
Most often I find myself tempted by a Loose-Id gay story, but when I see it being priced at 6.99$ the reasonable half of my brain simply balks. Frequently it’s a new author that catches my eye, and let’s be honest, a short excerpt provided on the website can be quite misleading. It is not the money what stops me from buying today but a question of principle. I pay 6.99 for a print paperback when I buy an author like Roberts or Carlyle, I have something that can be traded or sold, I don’t have that luck with ebooks.
I am wondering whether there are others that think like me. Sometimes I feel kind of freakish LOL, but after having suffered through my share of bad ebooks, I know I am simply not willing to invest that kind of money when all I can do in case of dislike is to delete the book from my hard drive … duhh.
When I first discovered ebooks, I was the proverbial kid in a candy store. Definately one of the $100/month at EC readers. Then I branched out, found Liquid Silver, Loose ID, and Samhain; along with a few others.
I almost never buy at EC anymore. Most of the authors I really enjoyed have left, and I’m tired of wasting money on short, crappy stories with mechanical sex scenes. LS, LI, and Samhain tend to be better, not sacrificing story for sex scenes-even in the shortest of novellas.
I’m also less inclined to spend $ on ebooks these days because you can’t get a “feel” for the book by paging through it. It would be wonderful if ebook pubs could have a “take a look at a random page” feature like Amazon has. Excerpts are great, but they are like a movie preview; I’m seeing the teaser that you want me to see.
So I’ve mostly returned to brick-and-mortar stores. *shrug*
I buy a ton of e-books, as well as print, for a number of reasons, and I would say that a publisher who wants the same amount for an e-book as retail for a print book is being greedy, because obviously, physical production and distribution costs are way down.
I love the instant availability of e-books, the fact that a large amount of “consumerable” or “read-and-toss” books do not then have to take up physical space in my house, although my voracious reading appetites are dealt with, but still have a fondness for the actual physical books. Moreover a book you read, pass on (if it’s worth it), donate somewhere or sell to a used book store. The two latter activities are prohibited by e-book publishers, so there is no parity there either.
Susan
A couple of hard numbers to help fill in the Loose Id data:
Lord and Master is 62,000 words in manuscript, and is listed as a novel at $6.99
Dolphin Dreams is 101,000 words in manuscript, and is listed as a novel plus at $7.99
They do the occasional very short Fling at a lower price than the quoted one; Yule is 9,000 words, and $2.49
I need to get back to my current website update project of putting word counts on the individual book pages as well as in the bibliography…
I was just trying to give you an apple to apple comparison for the process. I think when it comes to longer books which are more and more frequently released in trade for 13.95 (usually 10 something with discount) all ebook publishers tend to provide the better price. That disappears if they go to print.
Sarah
Well Sarah, I did give a trade example with Lora Leigh which I almost did not include.
There is no such thing as trade in eBooks. Just word count and Lora Leigh really is not writing more words, it simply is presented in a bigger format in print.
But… I have to ask myself would I buy that price in an eBook?
How can you compare printing size or hard cover to the word count of an eBook?
The trade or hard cover printing traditional publisher is providing something different then, thus asking a higher price, that an ePublisher cannot.
I would not actually buy an eBook offered at a trade or hard cover price. Hell, even trade size and hard cover gets heavily discounted from list price because people will not buy that list price.
Teddy, one of the reasons for the comparison with trade paperbacks is that the epublishers are small presses. The fair like-for-like comparison is with trade paperbacks, not with mass market paperbacks, because epublishers and trade paperbacks are both selling to niche markets with typical print runs of a few thousand rather than the mass market with print runs of 30,000, 50,000 and up.
The reason this matters is because any publisher putting out books that are worth buying has fixed costs involved in getting the manuscript to a sellable state. Editing, proof-reading and so on. There are ways to cut those costs, but eventually the quality suffers. In small press those costs get spread out over a lot fewer copies, which is one reason why small press books are more expensive.
A lot of the books from the epublishers are published by them because the mass market publishers will not touch them. Not because they’re poorly written, but because the content is not suitable for mass market, whether it be because it’s a niche readership, it’s a length that’s not viable in print, or because it would cause them marketing problems. That’s the same reason for part (not all) of the trade paperback market — it’s catering to a niche that is economically viable for small press but not for mass market. So yes, ebooks from the small press epublishers *are* better compared with trade paperbacks than with Harlequin ebooks. They’re offering a book you’re not going to get from Harlequin.
Jules I totally disagree with this idea because the ePublishers themselves do not. They price based on word count just like eHarlequin. Several of them even do the stupid category like lines like Torrid Tarot.
eBooks are extremely cheap to create in comparison and to equate that with a trade size paperback or hard cover is ludicrous and will drive away customers.
Remember, you not only have to provide something different but of better quality. eBooks cannot provide a different print format or heavier stock. Just better covers, better editing etc etc. Many of the ePublishers fail or are in the process of failing to do even that.
This kinda goes back to my write up about why ePublishers are not taking the event of reading to bring back more of the personalized attributes. Like the series listings or other books offered by this author. When you cannot offer a better format than everyone else offer better content.
Hell, even the old Ace book pre-filled out order page would be a nice touch. So when I hand some shop owner a eBook in print they can see that it can be ordered from a reputable distributor that offers returns.
Of course they price based on word count. I’m not going to buy a short story at the same price as a full-length novel. But some of those fixed costs are related to word count — and it’s not realistic to say that a small press should undercut a giant like Harlequin in the same length category.
I think that a price of $8 for a full-length novel is reasonable, even if it’s as much as Harlequin charges. The dead tree version it’s fair to compare with on prices is trade paperback, not mass market, for the reason I gave above. It’s not just on page count, but on print run. Where I *would* agree is that charging $4 for something a quarter of the length of that $8 novel is being silly.
Ebooks aren’t that cheap to create if they’re being properly put together. There’s a lot more involved than just running a file through a Word-to-pdf converter. (Or at least there should be — it is unfortunately quite true that some epublishers have been set up by people who think that’s all there is to it. Emily collects statistics and grave markers…) I know that *I* get several editing passes plus proof-reading comments.
But “not just different, but of better quality”? Would you really argue that if an epublisher is publishing books in a genre that Harlequin won’t touch, those books must be not just as good as Harlequin’s titles, but better?
I’m with you all the way on the idea that the books should be of equal standard, and that a publisher or author shouldn’t think that they can be sloppy just because it’s a niche genre and there’s nowhere else for a reader of that genre to go. I’ve got a draft blog post brewing on that subject myself. I think that the shorter lengths of ebook are by and large unrealistically priced. But saying that they must be something a reader can’t get from Harlequin, *and* a better book than Harlequin provides, *and* cheaper than a Harlequin book of the same length is, I think, also being unrealistic.
I did complain about the price recently because this stuff adds up and you can’t share the books with your pals. That SO blows. Still, I love my ebooks. I read 5 in the last 5 days. But none from EC. There is a distinct quantity over quality feel to them lately.
Oh, Sarah: $13.95 for Caine’s Reckoning. I bought a copy for my sister this week.
Jules I honestly don’t care much for eHarlequin. But… it makes a great bottom line for me. If you cannot provide something better than that at the price they ask you are so not gonna attract customers.
Yes, even a Romance genre that most mainstream Publishers won’t touch properly handled and packaged with equal care to details needs to be at least handled at the production line level of a eHarlequin.
I bring all this up because the customer is always right and the customer thinks $8.00 for poor editing and mechanical stories they are getting is crap.
You put an $8.00 price tag on a eBook (When I can go down the street and pick up a paperback for at least that.) with your company logo, it had damn better be worth it or you are putting your whole companies reputation on the line. Because I can return that paperback, I cannot return your eBook.
As a Gay man that reviews eBooks and has a bias for Gay stories have you seen me recently put any Torquere Press eBooks up?
No, they burned me once too often. Even I have my limits.
I’m pretty biased ;) but I think Samhain has competitive pricing.
Interesting topic, Teddy. I’ve always been curious to see a side by side comparison. We need a graph or something!
If the stories are crap and you’re still being charged as much for them as for a Harlequin, go ahead and bitch about it, as loudly as possible. I was a reader before I was ever an author. :-) But your follow-up comments (not so much the original post) read to me like you want the stories to be different *and* better *and* cheaper, just because they’re ebooks. I think it’s reasonable to ask for any two out of three. I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask for all three. Well, it’s reasonable to ask, but it’s not reasonable to expect to get it.
Jules,
eBook technology is far cheaper (minuscule even) than the type of financial risk experienced by a small traditional press.
Just list the fly by night ePublications out there.
So yes, simply put eBooks should always be cheaper than a paperback. If you noticed I did not give examples of “eBook in print pricing” next to the traditional pubs or if they allow returns. You do that and things get really worse.
I suspect one of the things going on here is a transAtlantic cultural difference — the idea of returning a book because I didn’t like it is completely alien to me. I was gobsmacked the first time I heard about someone doing this. If the book’s physically faulty, yes, but not because you just didn’t like it.
That means I simply don’t see such a difference between ebooks and dead tree books, whereas I do have a lot of sympathy with the argument that ebooks effectively cost more because you can’t turn them in for credit at the second-hand bookstore. I’ve had arguments with some of my mass-market published friends about second-hand bookshops, because some of them are dead set against them because of the loss of income, while I think that being able to trade a book for store credit plays into a lot of people’s assessment of whether a book is worth paying the cover price.
Angela,
Why is it when I start giving these facts out Samhain always comes out looking damn good?
I don’t buy the idea you do not have a graph already at the office with all this information compiled in real time with flagged indicators.
I really don’t think one can really just focus on mass market pricing as the standard on which to judge super plus ebook novel pricing. (Category is now down to 55K for all lines.) For one, mass market is traditionally around 80k computer count. Super plus novel length is traditionally found in trade and hard cover formats so those are more “fair” comparisons. With more and more NY pubs going to trade over mass market and their ebook prices nearly at trade prices, my point was that ebook publishers in general are pricing their ebooks much more competitively. Whether a reader feels the books at either end of the scale are worth the price would depend on the reader’s experience of the book. And that will vary so widely it likely defies conformity to blanket statements.
I do think (to go off on a tangent) that no matter where it’s published and at what heat level, a well written, well edited book with a strong voice that has a wide appeal will find its audience. And I do think that when a reader finds a books that completely works for them, they don’t begrudge the price. Well, at least I don’t. :)
Lisbea- In an effort to be fair, I was pricing at the cheapest I could find which was Amazon at the moment for CR.
I can put dead tree books from epublishers next to traditional print publishers quite happily, but that’s probably because a) I do think of them as small presses, and am comparing them with respectable small press print books in the sf genre, b) I’ve also got UK book prices to compare with.
I won’t pay $13 for a US mass market paperback, but I will and have paid $13 and more for a trade paperback. I think the last one was Tachyon’s new edition of Peter Beagle’s “A Fine and Private Place”, for $15 at Baycon last year. I don’t do it very often, and if there’s a mass market edition I’ll buy that in preference, but sometimes there isn’t a mass market edition, and it’s a book I want.
So if it’s something I could buy in mass market, I’ll buy it in mass market. If it’s a niche genre and only available in small press, at small press prices, well, if I like it enough I’ll buy it.
None of which is to say that I think you don’t have a point. People who spend $8 on a book and find it’s crap are not going to be happy, whether they’re thinking of it comparison with Harlequin, or in comparison with dead tree small press. But the problem there is that the book is crap, and there’s plenty of crap available for free on the Intertubes.
Thank you so much for the info! Especially word counts for the printed paperbacks which gives me something to compare to. As a consumer I’ve spent more money on e-books in the past couple of months than on printed books in the past couple of years. But there is going to have to be a limit.
And I can not wrap my mind around the idea that something that is sent to me electronically costs almost as much as something which requires manufacturing, transportation, storage, sales, etc. And which I as a consumer have a lot less leeway in which to deal with it. No passing it on to my friends or relatives, no carrying it around with me on errands (unless I buy a pricey e-book reader), etc.
I would think that the market for e-books must be in it’s very early stages as I don’t think I personally know another reader who buys them or is even aware that they exist beyond the electronic format from regular publishers like Harlequin.
Sarah,
My big worry is that ePublishers are burying that strong new voice under a mountain of poor marketing choices and bad pricing decisions. Greed and poor management kills not just a company but also it’s community.
Teddy- That is a concern, but that’s the author’s job to weigh before signing wiith a publisher and probably one of the reasons in ebook and NY authors move from house to house as house policies change.
As far as the cost of producing ebooks, they are less than print, but successful epublishers do have set expenses that must be recouped while still maintaining a profit. FWIW ebook prices have been pretty stable for a couple years.
NY pricing for ebooks I can’t explain except that I think one of the reasons they are priced at Mass market prices is that they will eventually replace mass market as an initial form of release. (mass market has a very low profit margin) ie- books will release in e and trade simultaneously. The way a few houses are doing with their lines already.
Actually this conversation came up because eBook prices have been rising while quality has been slipping.
You know, the quality thing is HUGE. I’m simply not shopping at EC unless I know the author’s work. Loose-id? I take lots of chances. Good quality. Good product.
Teddy, I worry about it as well. For all that I’ve been arguing with you, I actually agree with most of what you’ve been saying — it’s simply the expectation that small presses should be putting out books that are both better quality *and* lower priced than the mass market publishers that I have concerns about. In general small press books are published in small press because they have a viable niche audience but not the audience to achieve economies of scale.
One of the things that bothers me is the price/word ratio for the short books. There are fixed costs per title as well as fixed costs per word, which means prices aren’t going to scale linearly; but even so, as a reader I think the price of buying a short story or novelette as a standalone ebook is well out of line with the cost of buying a magazine with several such stories. Part of this is of course simply the cost of taking payment over the web — if the credit card company is going to charge a publisher 30c per transaction, it’s going to cost money to sell a single short at 49c. Fictionwise works around this with the Micropay system, but the individual epublishers haven’t really got to grips with this.
As it happens, I write very few short stories anyway, but I don’t often deliberately write a short story for epublishing, for this reason.
Sharyn: long explanation coming up…
The costs of making and shipping the physical book aren’t the only costs involved in getting a finished book to you the reader. They may not even be half of the cost, even though they’re the ones that are obvious to someone who doesn’t get to see the sausage-making process. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes, that a reader won’t normally know about, unless they happen to hang out on the blogs of sf editors who like to talk about this sort of stuff (which is actually where I first learned all this, not from being an author myself).
Big time costs: editing, proof-reading, typesetting, cover art. These can add up to a lot of money. And you’ll miss them if they’re not there — a lot of the recent complaints about poor quality in ebooks are essentially about these things being poor or missing.
Small presses can often do this more cheaply (and not necessarily at the expense of quality). But they also have to spread the cost over far fewer copies per title. As an example, if all of this stuff that happens before a book is ready to put on sale costs $1000 for a particular title, then if it sells 1000 copies, that costs the publisher $1 per copy. The same title selling 50,000 copies would cost 2c per copy.
And while I’ve used nice round numbers to make it easy, those numbers are the difference between small press ebooks and mass market paperbacks. An epublisher that sells more than 10,000 copies of a title is doing very well indeed, and it’s a lot more common to sell around a thousand copies on a popular title, even for the top tier of epublishers. By comparison, the typical Harlequin mass market paperback will sell tens of thousands of copies, and ones that do well will sell hundreds of thousands of copies.
This is why epublishers are currently a good option for the sort of books you can’t get from Harlequin, but not the best place to go for the sort of story you can buy from Harlequin. Small press books are always going to be more expensive than mass market books in the same book format, because it costs them more per copy sold just to get the book ready to put on sale. What ebook does is allow you to buy some of those small press books at the same price as a mass market paperback.
Hmm, I don’t keep track of other publisher pricing, so I should have said EC’s pricing has been stable. EC, being the biggest house out there, used to set the “standard” (don’t know anymore) and other houses after undercutting or holding steady historically worked their way up to the same structure.
For me personally, though, I’d rather pay higher prices and see more books with better editing. Not just gramatical editing but full editing that addresses structural issues, plot issues, etc.
Really, as a consumer I’m easy. I’ll pay just about anything for a great read. *G*
Marketing, promotion, office supplies, rent, lawyer’s fees, website, webmaster, shopping cart… Shall I go on?
This is why people who think starting up an epublisher is just a matter of putting a few books soon find out they’re sadly mistaken. Ebooks aren’t 40% to the author and 60% profit for the publisher. The profit margin is more single digits because a good publisher is putting their money back into the company in a variety of ways, just like any business.
Jules: TOTAL aside: Peter Beagle’s “A Fine and Private Place”,I love that book.
Angela~ Well put. That’s exactly what any good business does if they want to stay in business. I’ll pay for a good product. Finding it may prove to be a tad difficult, but that’s where the obnoxious bloggers come in.
I have only been buying ebooks since last summer and I have noticed a price increase in just that short amount of time. Because of that increase I am much more careful about what I buy and less likely to try a new author or a ebook just based on the blurb on the website. I usually wait until a blogger I trust reviews it and tells me what they liked and what they didnt like about it before I buy it. Books On Board is the site I most frequent now and I find they have very good prices. I just found a book there that I paid $6.99 for in print and I could have bought it from them for $3.63.
The harlequin thing is interesting because they don’t pay higher royalties for digital books.
And Angie - thanks for pointing all that out. I think sometimes people tend to forget epublishers still have overhead even if they don’t put books out in paper first.
Lastly, even though I write plus novels for EC, I have to agree that there’s no comparison between trade paper and plus novels in digital format. The paper isn’t bigger, it doesn’t take up more shelf space, etc. It’s just a digital file with more words.
I understand editing and cover art, but I don’t understand why proofreading and typesetting is costly. Typesetting should be pretty easy. And proofreading… some publishers don’t even pay their proofreaders. ex. Loose Id, Total-E-Bound, etc.
I get the feeling Teddy isn’t saying “[ebooks] must be something a reader can’t get from Harlequin, *and* a better book than Harlequin provides, *and* cheaper than a Harlequin book of the same length”. He’s just trying to say that ebooks have to cost less. If they don’t, then it’d better be a much better quality than Harlequin’s. So it’s just either-or. He’s not asking for both. He’s just saying he’s irritated because a lot of ebooks are not cheap AND they’re not better quality. That hurts new authors coming in, because readers won’t want to buy their books.
That aside, I LOVE Samhain. Even their slogan is cool: It’s all about the story. Pointless sex scene after sex scene wears you out and just gets on your nerves. But then some people like that, so I guess EC would be perfect for that.
I also agree with this post. Ebooks are expensive. And most of the time, the quality is also pretty bad. Some books at Torquere are good, but the editing and proofreading is beyond poor. I admit, we don’t find as many typos in Loose Id publications, but it’s still pretty pricey. I wouldn’t know about EC because I don’t shop there. Part of it has to do with their horrible covers.
Maggie, Teddy actually does say pretty much that over the course of the comments. He says that they have to be different to mass market paperbacks *and* better (5.36 am), and then later says that ebooks should always be cheaper than mass market paperbacks (6:33).
You can’t get all of those together unless you manage to find a market that will give you a much bigger fraction of the MMP sales numbers than ebooks currently have. The numbers simply won’t add up otherwise.
What *is* a valid criticism to make is when an ebook publisher is charging the price of a mass market paperback, but isn’t giving the reader something they can’t get in mass market.
What will change things is when there’s serious penetration of ebook readers. When only a small fraction of the potential readership is actually looking at ebooks as well as or instead of treeware, a publisher that’s ebook-only is a small press pretty much by definition, with all the pricing problems of a small press I’ve been talking about. There might well be a big readership out there for the sort of books I write, but I’m not going to find out until there’s a bigger market for ebooks in general. Because Harlequin isn’t going to touch them no matter how good a writer I am, unless I learn to write in Japanese. Tor probably isn’t going to either, for very pragmatic marketing reasons.
Well, the other way would be to write to the mass market publisher guidelines, and hope to become a sufficiently big name author that I can then present them with the books I really want to write. But if I enjoyed writing books that fitted those guidelines, I’d be doing it already. I’d get more money, for one thing…
You can’t get all of those together unless you manage to find a market that will give you a much bigger fraction of the MMP sales numbers than ebooks currently have. The numbers simply won’t add up otherwise.
Hold on there… So you are saying that eHarlequin is losing money on their eBooks by having the standards and prices they have? I don’t think they are that stupid, I might be wrong.
The more Publishers jump into the eBook market the less your claim makes sense Jules. Amazon is not stupid. Sony is not stupid. They all see a profit and the potential to make even more or they would not bother.
The strange part of all this is that right as Traditional Publishers are getting involved some of the top companies of ePublishing are lowering their standards.
It is great if your eBooks are sexier or include Gay Romance or some other hook eHarlequin does not have.
But, if your editing is bad or your packaging is lacking in comparison to their basic product then you should not be asking for a higher price for an eBook than they do.
Teddy, go back upthread and look at what I was saying about small press publishers and higher costs per copy sold.
Harlequin is not a small press publisher. It is a very, very, *very* big publisher. It gets to spread those fixed costs per title over tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies. It incurs additional costs in putting out an additional format, but that’s what ebooks are to Harlequin — just another book format. They’ve already covered the costs of editing and so on on the print edition; at the moment ebooks are just gravy. They’re not losing money, because their costs per copy of simply being in business are lower by an order of magnitude. That’ll shift as the balance between treeware and ebooks shifts, but they’re always going to have the advantage of having print runs tens or hundreds of times larger than a small press.
The one to compare with is Harlequin spice briefs, where it’s e-only. 15,000 words IIRC, though I need to dig out the guidelines. $2.99. And their costs are lower, because they pay their authors less money than the small press epubs do, and a lot of the cost of just being in business as a publisher is still being covered by all those print books. I’ve been told they see it as a loss-leader, though I’d be interested to see if “loss-leader” just means “not making as much money as on the print lines”.
Amazon is not an ebook publisher. It is either a distributor, taking a large cut of the cover price on books published by someone else, or it is the equivalent of a printer, allowing people to upload their files and taking a cut of any sales made, but making no contribution other than server space and payment handling. It doesn’t do any editing or various other things that publishers do as part of the job of being a publisher.
I haven’t looked at Sony in detail. But as far as I’m aware, they’re operating the same model as Amazon — they make money from ebooks by taking a large chunk of the cover price on a book that someone else has published.
There’s lots of money to be made in epublishing, but it’s a lot easier to make money at it if the costs of actually getting the books into market-ready form are incurred by someone else. In Harlequin’s case, by being part of a much bigger company and having the costs incurred by the mass market format. In Amazon’s case, by being a book distributer and printer rahter than a pbulisher.
Jules, thanks for your explanation. In theory, I know those facts apply and are absolutely valid, yet in the end it boils down to the fact that I still don’t accept to pay 7 to 8 $/book I can’t share and touch. Even in case of paperbacks (trade and mass), I select very carefully and only have a small number of authors I trust not to disappoint me. I would never go into a store and simply buy 3 trade size novels at 12-14€ whose covers and blurbs appeal to me. It’s not even a question of money, but after seven years of reading romance I have become incredibly picky and spent too much cash on books that were total wall bangers.
That’s the point of view of a reader who knows about production costs etc.., yet in the end it’s still the reader’s heart that decides, no matter if it makes sense from an economical angle or no.
(Sorry for any eventual mistakes, it was a looooong day *g*).
PS: Jules, not being from a English speaking country I was absolutely blown away when I first heard of the option of returning a book that didn’t appeal, *snort*.
Sorry nope,
You cannot whine that the big kid has more of an advantage than you do so you tell your customer that your product does not have to measure up.
Just because you make something by hand, if the cheaper product is made by machine and is of better quality then I say you better go buy that machine before you go out of business.
Changing the subject slightly — let’s look at Baen…
Baen *gives* *away* ebooks. They do this for a good reason. If they give away the first book in a series, people will try it and if they like it they’ll spend money on getting more books from that series, or perhaps more books from that author. And at the moment a lot of people will read ebooks, but like to have dead tree as well. They’ll often go out and buy the dead tree edition of something they first read in the Free Library.
So Baen gives away some ebooks, because it drives the sale of other books, and they sell more books overall than if they didn’t give away complete books as samples. But that only works because there are other books that people will spend money on.
There are ways you could run something like this at an epublisher, but it’s going to be tricky to do. It works best with longish series, and authors with plenty of titles. And it’s a hell of a gamble to take, both for publisher and for author, because you don’t have the leverage that Baen gets from the difference between the size of their ebook market, and the size of their print market.
The *other* thing that Baen does is sell ebook ARCs. For *more* than the cost of the mass market paperback… And if you want a copy of the final proofed version, you have to buy it separately. What they’re selling is the opportunity to read the book before it’s generally available, and they charge a pretty penny for it. And people pay $15, even though, as they say on the webscriptions website, “This is an unproofed manuscript and is guaranteed to be full of typos and error. It is pretty much raw from the authors word processor. But you get the entire eARC well in advance of even the WebScription release.”
Now that’s impressive marketing. :-)
I know when someone sends me an ARC and I like it I buy the eBook when it is published and if I really like it I buy the paperback. Because I want that author and that ePublisher to create more just like that.
I am also not against them framing their major authors more with special pricing or special printings. To me it makes sense to do special things with a known ace author with a running series.
Maybe make the next in the series a print first edition.
You would sell more print books before bringing out the eBook edition.
Teddy, if it’s something particular you want, and the big kid won’t make that particular something because they don’t see any profit in it, or think it’s too much trouble — you’ll pay what the small kid needs to cover production costs, or you’ll do without.
If the product’s rubbish, then of course you’ll do without. Why pay for rubbish? At no point have I said that you should accept a book that is of *lower* quality than what you can get from the mass market publishers. But you’ve been saying that you want it to be not just as good as, but better — *and* cheaper as well.
Katie, I know where you’re coming from, because I’m pretty selective about who and what I’ll buy in anything other than MMP. And I have a better grasp of the gruesome details of book economics than the average reader. It’s got to be good to justify the price. Teddy’s point in the original post about dropping quality while raising prices isn’t one I’d argue with.
As Teddy will doubtless point out if I don’t shut up and go and write some more smut soon, I don’t even buy ebooks myself, because I’m one of the people who simply doesn’t get on with them. They are physically much harder for me to read than treeware is. There’s also the issue of the price of the hardware. *That’s* a barrier to wider ebook reading that people don’t talk about enough in conversations about ebook pricing, because generally the people having the discussions have already gone past that problem.
I never call your writing Smut or Porn. Only because I actually read the stuff and know the difference.
For those wanting to know…
Smut or Porn is the ultimate Mary Sue Does Dallas. You can tell it immediately by the fact it almost never leaves the main characters POV and is all about them. Erotica adds more complexity usually around some type of sexual exploration and personal growth but basic Smut or Porn is all about the main POV and what they think and feel doing the numerous sex acts. It also as a rule never talks about emotional connection with another character except in the most general of terms.
Anyway, most Romance writers would find that severely cuts out the ability to sell an HEA unless that HEA is extremely one sided and self involved and likes to get itself off.
The thing with small presses is that fixed costs like editor salaries [which like all staff totally *should* be fixed costs] are spread over fewer copies and push up the price per unit. That said I am sure that like any company, epublishers charge what people will pay–not the maximising the number sold but the total amount earned so if fewer people will pay way more the cover price will go up. If people really do find the price to high sales will drop and some rapid recalculating will occur ;)
didn’t we already hash out the porn vs. romance question? jules, you write wonderfully explicit romance.
I’d point out that I write porn as well, only one of the beta readers said that the story I sold to Ultimate Gay Erotica read like a woman’s romance novel…
Most of the Porn I like tends to be more Erotica (Some type of growth in the main character) or Romance (The writer will have the other character start planning their future) and I seem to be the only one that enjoys that. So I know what you mean.
I think erotic romance in general need to stop worrying and embrace the porn. To my mind sex-writing is porn, subgenres go from there.
Porn is functional and has a place and a time and I would argue that it is only a sub genre of classic romance but tends not to be timely or keeper worthy as a similar story that also spends time in dealing with human emotions, relationships and growth.
I also dislike the idea that everything sexual should be labeled porn. That falls squarely into the thinking of the mentally unstable and religious fanatics.
Only if you allow them to abduct the work which means “sex writing”. I feel allowing a word with that meaning to be wholly derogatory immediately implys an embarrased of shamelful reaction to the subject. I write porn, it is meant to sexually arouse. As such the work is a subgenre of romance, of speculative fiction, of gay fiction and of pornography. Pronography is its own genre rather than existing only as a subset of other genres.
veinglory’s last blog post..Missed Ocean’s Press?–veinglory
I think the recalculating is already occuring ;)
I just noticed today when I received the Amber Quill Press newsletter. Their prices are pretty high but they had a 25% off all titles sale for December. It was probably really successful because they had that sale again for January and now they say the sale is going on through the month of February. I won’t be surprised if it continues into March, April, etc.
I’m so happy AQP is at least getting cheaper. I really love their Amber Allure titles and this means I can at least buy more.
Yep, I was one of the $100/ month at EC customers. And probably another $100/ month total between Loose-Id, Changeling, Torquere, and Fictionwise.
To me, EC shot themselves in the foot when they
raised their prices. I’d buy books from authors I liked and would then buy from authors I’d never read because it only cost me a couple of bucks to try them. I found a LOT of my (now) favorite authors that way.
However, now I not only have to pay MORE for authors I LIKE, but I’m usually paying more than I would for a print book. AND with their avalanche of unproven authors, the only cheap way to try them is in the 2.99 quickie format which soooo doesn’t showcase ANYONE’s talents, so why bother?!
Add in their tendency to hold back or space out releases from the popular authors, and I really don’t bother to browse over there any more. So, at least a hundred bucks a month down to zero bucks a month. Yeah, brilliant marketing plan EC.
Also, I understand (sorta) the reasoning behind ePubs releasing books in TRADE size print. But the fact is that, if I’m browsing in a bookstore, I’m just NOT going to be walking out with a bag full of those expensive trade sizes– certainly not authors/books I’m buying “on spec”. I have to believe I’m not alone in that, which makes me wonder just how lucrative the print market can possibly be for these epubs. I suppose, seeing their books in print somehow might make an ePub seem “legit” to an unsavvy reader who then might remember their name. But is that enough?
Bev(QB)’s last blog post..Amazon is Scaring Me
Trade paperback is the only way for small press publishers to afford print. Just ask Triskelion :P
And yes, it is lucrative, for us anyhow. I have the paycheck to prove it but I’m sure you’ll understand if I don’t offer up the hard evidence, lol. Small press is not the only type of publisher that uses trade paperback, so that should tell you that people do still buy them. Would we like to print in mass market? Heck yeah! But not at the expense of going out of business. And it would mean printing a very select few books in that format. Very select few.
Angela James’s last blog post..Divvies
As someone who is fairly new to ebooks, I have taken to them in a huge way. I have over 700 ebooks now. I have discovered so many great authors that I simply would not have found if I only bought in print format. Storing the ebooks on my Palm TX means I can take my library with me wherever I go. I have replaced the majority of my print books with ebooks and 95% of my new release purchases are ebooks.
For me, living in New Zealand, buying ebooks is a lot cheaper than buying in print format. It means I don’t have to worry about paying postage and I can download the ebook as soon as I have paid for it. New Zealand is such a small market and for an avid reader like myself it can be an expensive hobby. For the most part, the exchange rate between the $US and $NZ also makes it much cheaper for me to buy ebooks.
I definitely don’t understand the justification for trade/hardcover prices for ebooks, especially when you don’t always receive the bonuses at the back of the books. Nalini Singh’s Mine to Possess has an excerpt of Hostage to Pleasure in the paperback, but the ebook didn’t and Christine Feehan’s Dark Celebrations included chocolate themed recipes in the hardcover/paperback but not in the ebook yet I am being conned into paying the trade/hardcover price! I’m certainly more selective now about when and where I buy my ebooks. I have favourite must buy authors like Lora Leigh, Christine Feehan, Maya Banks, Lauren Dane, Melissa Schroeder etc and if the prices remain reasonable then I am happy to buy them on release when available from the ePublishers e.g Samhain and Ellora’s Cave etc but I simply won’t buy ebooks at the trade/hardcover price unless I can buy it from Fictionwise where I can get a discount and an additional rebate on total purchases over $100. I can understand that the publishers need to cover costs and make a profit but I don’t like the feeling of being ripped off. I’ve almost given up on Sherrilyn Kenyon - Upon The Midnight Clear was absolute rubbish. Fortunately I only paid $NZ12 for the paperback, I certainly wouldn’t pay $US14 for the ebook! The recent trend in charging trade/hardcover prices for popular authors just delays my purchases - I shall have to learn mediation to calm my nerves and control my desire to rush out and purchase new releases.
Wow, I’m glad that I’m not the only one who’s been dissatisfied with EC purchases. I don’t buy a heck of a lot of ebooks. But when I do, I take a long time looking at some of the big sites, reading excerpts, trying to find reviews, etc. before I buy.
The last two ebooks I purchased were from EC, and both were just not very good. I would agree that they are all about the hot sex and not about the story. Which is not what I’m looking for. I want a good story complemented by hot sex.
So, I will no longer go back to EC. Two poorly done books, and they have lost a customer. I was confused as to how EC is the big epub on the block…but I guess it really goes back to being the first one out there. That’s about it.
However, I am glad to see that many of you have complimented Samhain. I think I will try them next. I haven’t bought anything from them yet, but now that will be my first stop.