wheeeee

[sholio]

I just got a notification from Amazon that the new Ben January book has shipped! For some reason I thought it wasn't out until July. And it's supposed to get here by Wednesday! (Thank you, Amazon Prime!)

CHRISTMAS IN MAY!

I guess I know what I'm doing on Wednesday.

Comments

[lizbee]

OMG, that's exactly what I'll need after I finish Uprooted! And coming just days after I started mentally compiling a fanmix for the series!

[sholio]

Yay! \o/ This series definitely needs more love.

[lizbee]

Alas, the Kindle edition is exorbitantly expensive, and also not available until July. I SHALL POUT.

[sholio]

Holy shiznit, the Kindle edition is over twenty bucks, what. D: I bought one of the books in the series on Kindle a couple of years ago because it was last-minute and I wanted to have it for an airplane flight, and I thought it was exorbitant THEN (it was around $14, I think). Are people really willing to pay that much for a Kindle book?! (Says the woman who's paying $25 for a hardcover. Shhh.)

Also, Amazon still shows the release date as July 1 even though the book is now available to be purchased and mine is winging my way to me even as we speak! Oh Amazon. At least I know I wasn't just having a brain malfunction when I thought it was coming out in July.

[lizbee]

Yes! That's the sort of price I see for new-release Australian ebooks, not US novels! I agree that ebooks are widely underpriced, but that just seems massive.

I predict I'll crack within a week and buy the hardcover. But not right now, I just impulse-purchased some furniture.

[sholio]

Well, for the time being, I admire your restraint. :D

But yeah ... speaking as a self-publisher, I really don't have any idea what a fair price for an ebook ought to be. Book pricing is of course a mess, but in general -- in the U.S., anyway -- the prices for physical books are pretty closely based on production costs. Between the actual cost of a press run, needing to account for the wholesale-to-retail price markup (which is huge), and losses based on bookstore returns, there are reasons why hardcovers are priced so high! Ebooks don't have any of those concerns, and it's really hard for me to figure out how to price a commodity when physical cost of production isn't a factor. Obviously the publisher wants to make money, but setting the price that close to the hardcover price, when there is none of the same overhead, seems unfair.

[lizbee]

My Australian small press friends tell me that, once they've paid for editing, layout, encoding, cover art, the cost of an individual ebook is not that far from that of a printed copy. But that's in Australia, where economies of scale are quite different. The US market is completely different.

[sholio]

True! I guess I should say, it's not that there aren't production costs associated with ebooks, but with print books you have all the same costs plus the cost of physical printing and distribution, and it's the latter that the price is mainly based on. Which I guess is the main reason why self-publishing never really took off until ebooks became widespread, since it was simply impossible for most people to afford it. The only way to do it economically was by producing books in publisher-sized quantities.

But ebooks are just sort of a free-for-all! For me, there's next to no overhead on them, since I have a typesetting/graphic design background and can do most of the production myself. (The one thing I really should do is hire an editor, which is something I'm going to start doing with the Lauren books in the future, I think.) But is it fair to underprice my books when most people do have the need for those services? I don't know! And there's not really a well-established price scale for ebooks like there is for print books ... though it seems to be starting to happen now.