Those of you who know me know I fall under the category of “corporate schill”. I have a whole host of opinions on megacorps and teeny weeny corps and everything in between that stems from my years in a suit, observing and relating with people in suits and being intimately involved with the growth of at least two businesses and currently working on a third. It’s one of my ingrained character flaws I suppose. As a business-minded woman I can understand the whole “make money or perish” end of the business, but at the same time, as a professional creative type, I can absolutely understand the “I should get paid what I’m worth… dam**t” end of things as well. But that’s a topic for another rant. Perhaps when I’ve been drinking.
As a creative type (and a creative type who has been freelancing for the past ten years with some success) I find the current set of pricing wars regarding e-books somewhat disheartening. For a paperback, off the shelf at, say, BandN I pay around, what 8$? Amazon’s usually a touch cheaper, but I have to pay for shipping, so many times it balances out. I get the way that pricing is set up. Included in the price of the book I hold in my hand are the costs of printing, the paper, the ink, the artwork, the shipping, the warehousing, the $$ that presumeably goes to the author, the $$ that presumeably goes for Marketing, the $$ that goes to the publisher, the $$ that goes to the agent, etc. etc. It’s like hearing that Arnold Schwarzzenager made $10m for his last film, then going through and looking at the breakdown of where all the money goes and you realise that out of that$10m he managed to pocket 100k (which is still bank, but I’m going for the meta here).
So when I pay 8$ for an ebook, where does all that go? Joe Average (the bane of anyone who creates for a living) thinks that all that goes to the author, that the publication of a e-book is basically free and that all that $$ goes right into the pocket of the writer. Authors are working on correcting this, but without someone major throwing wither weight into the ring, the message isn’t getting out like it should.  From what I’m hearing bandied about,a big chunk goes to the purveyor (Amazon takes, what, 30-50% off the top?) a chunk goes to the publisher, again, a chunk goes to the agent. There’s no printing or shipping costs, but there are the costs for servers and e-delivery. There’s no annual fee for Kindle’s download service (for example) , so the cost for that access is rolled in as well. So here’s the thing I’m seeing (without having the numbers in hand, admittedly). When you pay for an ebook, you’re not paying for the printing or the shipping, but you are *still* paying for the development and maintence of those digital services, something that almost noone has brought up.Â
In my mind, they should be priced the same across the board. A standard ebook should be priced around the same as a standard paperback. Personally I think the author should get a bigger share as well, but I think that is going to have to be the job of the agent and those who negotiate such things in contracts. Those percentages fluctuate depending on the n00bness of the writer versus the savvy of the publisher and the tenaciousness of the agent, but I think that needs to be going *forward* not something that we need to be biting ourselves in the a** about for contracts done in the past. As little as 5 years ago, the ebook was a joke, the general public wasn’t interested so the rights were a non-entity. NOW, hoever, I would argue that the e-rights should be fought over, tooth and nail, just like the print rights are, perhaps even *more vehemently*.
So here’s where we get back on-topic. Apparently, Macmillan and Amazon have been heading down this road for a while now. This is looking more and more like Amazon is trying to do the equivalent of swatting Macmillan in the nose with a rolled-up newspaper for signing the deal (and being all “poster-boy”) with Apple for the iPad. When it first started showing up on teh interwebs, I didn’t think much of it. There’s a very high good-to-garbage ration out there and just because someone jumped on the “evil corporate bastards” bandwagon didn’t mean there *really* was a conspiracy out there. And as the news reports trickle in, I’m *still* not hearing either side weigh in, so the reality of this issue is that it’s still just vaporware. So at this time, I have to agree with Thomas’ Bucknell’s blog on the subject :
However, were I Amazon, this is *exactly* the type of tactic I would use to try and bring Macmillan to heel. They have just been hit in the snoot by Macmillan’s very public backing of the iPad (I think, however, that Macmillan doesn’t realise that by getting into bed with Apple, the consummate control freaks, they may have just signed themselves up for an even worse deal than before). Apple’s certainly going to let Macmillan charge *more* than 9.99$ for their ebooks, but that’s going to be offset by the fact that Apple is going to take a big-a** piece off the top for the privelige *and* that Apple is probably not going to provide the tools for editing and publishing. One of the benefits to Amazon is they have already developed the software and made it available, even to the noob who wants to publish their own magnum opus. Apple’s not as likely to do that, at least, not without a fee. And if you think you’re going to have any control over anything, like custom page layout or font choice, you may need to think again, I’m betting that Apple is going to require an across the board standardization.
So where does that leave us? It leaves us with an ebook war brewing. In fact, despite the fact that there are going to be short-term losses all around, we have a giant in publishing and a giant in distribution gearing up to have at one another. That means there’s finally enough money going around that the authors no longer have to put up with such a small percentage. It means that Joe Average is going to get exposed to the information they *need* to know in order to support the 10$ pricetag on ebooks. For the ebook industry (and by extension, the authors involved) it’s going to mean that they’ve arrived, that ebooks are now a viable way to produce and deliver content, the type of public buy-in that that has been lacking until now.
