My last post tried to lay out a comparison of royalties paid by big publishers to agented authors on ebooks against what they pay on print books. What it showed is that the authors suffer a bit on ebook sales that substitute for hardcover print sales, but that they do pretty well selling an ebook […]
Archives for August 2010
The royalty math: print, wholesale model, agency model
I have been helped in trying to parse the ebook royalty question by a numerate agent. While he helped with me the methodology, the numbers that appear in the tables below below are my responsibility. I hope that arraying the information this way will help everybody think through the question of ebook royalties with more […]
There’s only one Seth Godin, but there are other authors who might emulate him
What shoved other news aside this morning was the word from Seth Godin that he won’t be publishing books with publishers anymore. This is another early indication that it is going to get harder and harder for trade publishers to sign up books. It is not the first one. Thriller writer J.A. Konrath discovered the […]
The printed book’s path to oblivion
The “death” of the printed book has been under discussion for a long time. (I gave a speech with that subject as the title to publishers in Spain in 1997 — with a question mark after it and predicting correctly that the most immediate impact of digital change would be that we’d sell more printed […]
Learning some things at dinner in Sao Paolo
I was struck when I visited Australia three years ago at how the protection of thousands of miles of ocean had kept their book trade looking like ours did three decades ago. Prices of books were very high in stores and there were lots of stores and lots of independent stores. But the biggest moat […]