(1) MILLIONS STAYED HOME. The Force Awakens made plenty of money in China, but it did not blow up the way it did in the U.S. Inverse ponders “Why Chinese Audiences Skipped The Force Awakens”. BEWARE SPOILERS.
But Zhen, also the director of NYU’s Asian Film and Media Initiative, says there’s another simple reason why Star Wars isn’t as successful in China.
“Chinese audiences are not as familiar with the series and franchise as a whole,” she says. “There is much less knowledge of it or a cult following, but the curiosity is there.”
It makes perfect sense. The Chinese market is blooming so quickly that it’s easy to forget it’s Hollywood’s youngest sibling. The first Star Wars film to be released in China was The Phantom Menace in 1999, making both the rapid proliferation of Hollywood blockbusters in China in recent years impressive, but also the extreme newness of Star Wars as a phenomenon that much more apparent.
China’s primary moviegoing audience is made up of 17-to-31 year-olds who didn’t get the same embedded, multi-generational cultural significance as American audiences that came of age when Star Wars debuted in 1977.
(2) EYE CANDY. Terra Utopische Romane 1957-68 on the Retro-Futurism LiveJournal.
“These old covers are like candy,” says Will R. And Planet X makes an appearance.
(3) FANDOM’S CLOSER. A pitcher for the Oakland Athletics doubles as a trivia maven — “Watch Sean Doolittle answer your deepest, most important Star Wars Questions”. Cut4 warns there could be SPOILERS – at least there could be if any of the stuff he says is true.
yo this Chewbacca costume is really itchy. wookie mistake. #TheForceAwakens pic.twitter.com/cNjl5bVyl1
— Sean Doolittle (@whatwouldDOOdo) December 18, 2015
(4) GAME APP. In “Super Barista: Manage your own coffee shop and alien clientele in space”.
If you’re a nerd like us, chances are you also love coffee. Those things tend to go hand-in-hand, and today’s app combines coffee nerdiness with space action gaming nerdiness, and it’s called Super Barista.
The premise behind Super Barista is that you serve a very specific, yet broad clientele in your coffee shop. The trick is, that coffee shop is set in space, and your clientele is an assortment of strange, interesting, and sometimes dangerous alien beings. Your shop will take you across the galaxy to five different unique planets where you’ll have to manage your resources, build your staff and crew, and serve your delicious drinks in a timely and efficient manner.
(5) IN MEMORIAM. Steven H Silver has posted his annual In Memoriam list at SF Site.
(6) PEN HONORS ROWLING. “PEN America to Honor J.K. Rowling, Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch at Annual Literary Gala”.
Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling will receive the 2016 PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award at PEN America’s annual Literary Gala on May 16 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. PEN America, the country’s largest writer-driven free expression advocacy organization, presents the award annual to a critically acclaimed author whose work embodies its mission to oppose repression in any form and to champion the best of humanity….
Since her rise from single mother to literary superstar, J.K. Rowling has used her talents and stature as a writer to fight inequality on both a local and global level. Her charitable trust, Volant, supports causes in the United Kingdom and abroad that alleviate social exclusion, with particular emphasis on women and children. In 2005 she founded Lumos, a nonprofit organization that works to help eight million children institutionalized around the world regain their right to a family life. Herself the frequent object of censorship in schools and libraries across the globe, as well as online targeting, Rowling has emerged as a vocal proponent of free expression and access to literature and ideas for children as well as incarcerated people, the learning -disables, and women and girls worldwide….
(7) MORE ON FANFIC. Sharrukin at Sharrukin’s Palace tells what he finds helpful about writing fanfic. His is set in the universe of the Mass Effect game.
First advantage of writing fan-fiction: You will immediately start to build an audience, and get feedback for your work.
By the end of that month, I had posted thirteen chapters, about 40,000 words of new material, and I was still going strong. I finished that entire first novel in a little over four months.
Memoirs was followed by a second novel, composed of substantially original work since most of it was set during a period when Liara and Shepard are not on stage together. I took the opportunity to flesh out Liara’s character arc, introduce a bunch of new supporting characters, and start patching the big plot holes I saw in the games. By the time I got to my novelization of the third game, I was working almost entirely without a net, openly rewriting the story from the ground up.
The experience was tremendously valuable. I learned more about my craft from writing a fan-fiction trilogy than I had learned in decades of on-again, off-again dabbling. I even broke my long-standing aversion to the shorter forms, writing several short stories and a novella along the way.
Some pro authors are a little disdainful of fan-fiction. I believe George R. R. Martin has compared it to paint-by-numbers, something that doesn’t rank with original work as a creative endeavor. I’m not going to dispute that. There are several reasons why I’m working hard now to move away from fan-fiction, and one of them is the desire to create something worthwhile that’s really mine. But as an exercise in improving your craft so that you can survive as a genre author, there’s a lot to recommend it.
You won’t have to do all the work yourself. The source material provides a framework on which you can build and experiment. Your audience will already be familiar with it. Still, you will have to work on the mechanics: prose style, description, exposition, dialogue, point of view, characterization and voice. You will end up taking the original material apart and analyzing it, seeing what worked and what didn’t, in the process of putting together your own version. You will get practice in the simple art of sitting down and cranking out word count, week after week, so that your audience doesn’t get bored and wander away.
(7) EBOOK PRICING. Amanda S. Green compares print book and ebook pricing in “Publishers, You Need To Hear This” at Mad Genius Club.
So, is there a trend — or possibly a clue — here as to why e-book sales for the Big 5 are leveling off?
Some folks were having this discussion yesterday in a private FB group I belong to. The consensus among those taking part in the discussion was that the price point publishers were charging, especially for newly released titles, was more than they were willing to pay. Not just for e-books but for hard covers as well. Those who aren’t big fans of e-books lamented the fact they were turning to used bookstores to buy those hard cover titles they wanted. Not because they were paying less for the book but because they knew authors don’t receive royalties for those sales.
Note, they weren’t worried about the publishers.
And that is something the Big 5 needs to realize. The reading public is starting to look at the prices they pay for their books — whether they are print or digital — and wonder why the prices are so high. They are following their favorite authors, many of whom write for publishers that aren’t the Big 5 or who are indies, and they are paying attention to what the authors are saying. They understand that the life of the writer is closer to struggling author working in a coffee shop than it is to Castle. They are beginning to realize that the majority of the money they pay for that book, the vast majority of it, goes not to the person who created it but to the corporation what distributed it.
(8) STRACZYNSKI INTERVIEW. Lightspeed Magazine has a transcription of the J. Michael Straczynski interview that was originally part of WIRED’s Geeks Guide to the Galaxy podcast.
I was a street rat, had grown up a street rat, I come from nothing, my family has no connection to literature or writing, and in his introductions I found a kindred spirit. Harlan Ellison was a street rat. He had run with gangs; he was considered trouble. I remembered that in one of his introductions, he had given his phone number. “I wonder if that’s real,” thought I, so I dialed the number and waited and it began to ring. There was a click and I heard, “Yeah?”
“Is this Har-har-har-lan Ellison?” says I.
“Yeah, what do you want?”
“My-my-my-my name is Joe,” I say, stammering through the whole thing, “And I’m a writer and my stuff isn’t selling and I thought you might have some advice.” Which is the stupidest thing to ask any writer; it’s like saying to someone, “What are you doing to my wife?” There is no good answer to that question.
So he says, “All right. Here’s what you do: If it’s not selling, it’s shit. My advice to you? Stop writing shit.”
“. . .Thank you, Mr. Ellison.” Years later, I got to LA and we met in bits and pieces and eventually we became friends, and I finally reminded him of that conversation. And he said, “Were you offended?” And I said, “Had you been wrong, I would’ve been offended.” But he wasn’t.
(9) SANDIFER WONDERS ALOUD. It’s funny that some people will think Phil Sandifer was the first person to ask this question, in “An Open Letter to Sad Puppies IV”.
As the science fiction community mutters “I thought MidAmericon said nominations would open in early January” with baited breath, I note that certain fascist pricks have begun to ramp up their performative chortling. So I figured “why not write a mildly trolling open letter to someone else entirely?”
Ms. Paulk et al:
I note with some bemusement your efforts to reform the Sad Puppies movement from its oft-criticized 2015 form, stripping away its overtly conservative trappings, widening it to a ten-item recommendation list, et cetera. By and large, I have to admit, these seem like, if not strictly speaking good things, at least less bad things. So thank you for your efforts to be less odious than your predecessors. It’s genuinely appreciated. That said, there’s one rather large issue that you don’t seem to have addressed, and that I’d like to raise.
Simply put, why are you doing this?
(10) GRRM RESPONDS. For the record, here’s how George R.R. Martin answered John C. Wright’s latest overture.
I agree, death has a way of putting life’s other trials and triumphs in perspective. My own political and social views are very much at odds with yours, Mr. Wright, and our views on literary matters, especially as regards science fiction and fantasy, are far apart as well. But I have always believed that science fiction has room for all, and I am pretty sure that David Hartwell believed that as well. If we want to heal the wounds our community suffered last year, all of us need to stop arguing about the things that divide us, and talk instead about the things that unite us… as writers, as fans, as human beings. Our grief in David’s passing is one of those things. Everyone who ever knew him or worked with him will miss him, I do not doubt. So thank you for your note, and your heartfelt and compassionate words about David.
(11) A DIFFERENT WRIGHT. The home of the late Jack Larson – “Jimmy Olsen” on the original Superman TV series – is up for sale.
Frank Lloyd Wright‘s George Sturges House, owned by actor and playwright Jack Larson, will be auctioned on 21 February, 2016, for an estimated $2.5 million to $3 million. It is among 75 lots from the estate owned by Larson to be sold after the actor passed away in September. The residence, designed in 1939, was the first Usonian house on the West Coast and was acquired by Jack Larson and Jim Bridges in 1967.
(12) DON’T PANIC. Thug Notes has done a summary and analysis of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Got to love the moment our narrator explains, “But Dude don’t know what the question is!”
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Will R., and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contrbuting editor of the day Ian P.]
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Fifth!
::ticky::
(6) PEN HONORS ROWLING
There’s something wrong with the formatting of that one.
Trois
Numberth!
And yeah, the paragraphs in the Rowling piece want to be lines. Long lines that go right off the screen.
Firth
The formatting on (6) is doing something odd for me.
On an unrelated note – I was at the Castalia House website the other day for reasons and I noticed that in terms of books and stuff they advertise it seemed to be all old stuff e.g. not the recent JCW or VD or the There Will Be Warts X etc. And I found that odd. I offer not hermeneutic analysis or statement of significance regarding this factoid other than ‘odd’.
(7) EBOOK PRICING Amanda S. Green writes:
Remember the First Amazon-Macmillan War of 2011 or whenever? I blogged up a storm on that, drawing on my experience in corporate finance and my first career in retail bookselling. And based on that experience, I took Amazon’s side, putting me at odds with Scalzi and Stross and Tobias Buckell and even my friends the N-Hs. And I am very comfortable saying that Green is wrong here. As a very rough rule of thumb, author royalties will be about 1/8 the retail price of the book and PPPB (paper, printing, binding, freight-in) will be another 1/8 of the price. In fact, the pricing rule of thumb is literally “8x PPPB” is your retail price. These are true variable costs – each new copy incurs a royalty payment plus manufacturing costs. In fact, as a wise publisher sales rep once told me, “If you’re a book publisher, you’re in the manufacturing business.” (Less true to the extent ebooks come to predominate.)
The publisher will manage to sell most of their physical copies to distributors, etailers or big-box stores at 1/2 the cover price. (It will manage to sell some more to indies and small chains at closer to 60% of cover price.) The publisher will then enjoy a gross margin of roughly 50%. (0.50 x retail less 0.25 x retail.) That is assuming the book earns out, of course. If it doesn’t, the effective royalty shoots above 12.5% of sales, maybe way above. We also haven’t taken into account a reserve against returns: hardcopy returns can run anywhere from 10-30% of copies printed and shipped. And while you can take back royalties on returned copies under standard contract terms, the PPPB is gone. Sorry!
If there’s a 20% return rate, net of the royalty-recoup, it reduces your gross margin by 15%. So the real gross margin net of returns reserve is 35% of the wholesale price. If you bought the book at full price, that’s like 18% of what you paid, way less than a majority, let alone the “vast” majority. Even if you bought it 40% off from an etailer, the publisher’s gross margin is less than 30% of what you paid.
Here’s where I continue boring you all only long enough to point out that the publisher has expenses below gross profit! Some of these may be variable – I’m not completely current on how contribution profit is calculated in the publishing biz. Others are infrastructure costs – all the stuff that goes into SG&A like facilities, staffing, office supplies, telecom et so on. It’s not that there’s no profit in dead-tree publishing, but like any other mature industry, there’s a lot of downward pressure on it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the publisher’s average EBITDA on a book is about equal to the author’s royalty rate – very roughly 1/8 of the retail price – but I’d be surprised indeed if it were much higher.
And do note that at every step in the chain the evil entity with its hand out also has expenses: the printer has expenses; the big-box store has expenses; the giant etailer has expenses. And yes, so does the author.
tl;dr: No, Amanda S. Green, that’s not how it works. Meanwhile, I realize this is dull. My punishment is that there’s no way I’ll have finished this in time to be fifth.
Yeah, the largest chunk of the cover price paid for a book goes to the retailer.
This is just fine. Retailers need to pay the rent too.
@Jim Henley: I came here pretty much to say that. Thanks for doing it so I didn’t have to!
Why can’t people realize that when you purchase most products, a large chunk of the money goes to the manufacturer/seller? I agree it’s not always a fair percentage, but that’s capitalism as it exists today, yes?
Also, eleventy-fifth! 🙂
No, Amanda S. Green, that’s not how it works.
One might also note that her version of market research was to talk to her Facebook friends. She then expands upon this conversation to claim things about what the “reading public” thinks. That’s some real high quality analysis she’s doing there. My eyes rolled so hard they got stuck.
(2) EYE CANDY.
Don’t know about the covers, I was too distracted by the blinking star background. Does this mean the return of the blinking scrolling marquee?
(5) IN MEMORIAM.
Steven H. Silver also maintains the MidAmeriCon II memoriam page which has a webform for submissions.
(7) EBOOK PRICING.
So there is a bit of a Dutch Auction approach to books which is why the e-ARC version of Baen books is more expensive than waiting for the official e-book release. And e-books don’t get discounted while new. It’s good business practice to try & get as much revenue at the higher price point before dropping prices. There’s also the misconception that e-books are that much cheaper to produce than dead tree versions.
(9) SANDIFER WONDERS ALOUD. It’s funny that some people will think Phil Sandifer was the first person to ask this question.
Sandifer’s not the first person to make those observations but it’s a well constructed letter. It’s why many (myself included) are side-eyeing & adopting a wait & see approach when it comes to SP4 & this year’s Hugos.
(10) GRRM RESPONDS.
I remain hopeful but am wondering if the “peace between us” is between JCW & GRRM only?
Since many fifths have been claimed, I’ll claim second 7 in honour of this Scroll
(Psst, there are 2 number 7s)
9)-I’m probably the only one who cares, but I’ve seen the same mistake several times in the last week or so and I just feel like pointing it out. It’s “bated breath”, not “baited breath”.
I’ll go stand in the corner now.
@Robert Reynolds,
May I join you in the corner?
[You are aware of the Eggcorn Database?]
Today’s read — The Severed Streets, by Paul Cornell
The second book in Paul Cornell’s entry in the surprisingly vast Magical London Police Force subgenre (his is the gritty police procedural one) makes use of the Jack the Ripper murders, as most such series are apparently contractually obligated to do. But to be fair, the story takes a good approach to that subject. I was also amused by the appearance of a certain well-known-fantasy-author as a character in the book who is given an interesting twist in the narrative. For all that, though, I wasn’t as taken with this one as I was with the first book, London Falling. The best part of London Falling was that it was a novel really steeped in police culture with a case being solved by dogged police procedure, plus it had interesting character work. This novel had a bit less on both fronts, and I thought it suffered some because of it. (Darn it, sometimes a description of a burned-out analyst reading mountains of real estate transaction documents in response to brutal supernatural murders is exactly what I want!) I won’t say it’s a bad book, but it didn’t quite scratch the very particular itch the first one did, which makes it a less standout book and a little more generic.
@Soon Lee: Yeah, that Stross comment was one of the things I was disagreeing with back during the wars. Stross knows a little more than Amanda Green, but not enough more to be as cocksure as he was during that episode. For one thing, “$2-3” is not a tiny share of the range at stake – the $5 difference between the $9.99 Amazon wanted to charge and the $14.99 the publishers wanted to force them to charge. (And succeeded in doing so!) For another, Stross only reckoned with raw paper costs, not printing, binding and freight. And like most laymen, he never reckoned with returns: the returns reserve goes away completely in an ebook world.
Let’s put some numbers to that.
$28 hardcover book (retail)
$14 amount paid by evil ecommerce giant
——-
– 4 author royalty
– 4 PPPB
– 2 Returns reserve
——–
($10) deductions from publisher revenue
$ 4 publisher gross profit
Now, in the ebook scenario, these expenses go away:
($4) PPPB
($2) Returns reserve
——–
($6) Surplus available to be split among all parties (author, consumer, publisher, etailer)
Six bucks is a huge figure here. Note how it stands in rough relation to the difference between $14.99 and $9.99 that was at issue in the Amazon-Macmillan War of 2010*. Yup, it’s the whole ball game. The publisher was literally saying, “No, Amazon, you keep it. We don’t even want it ourselves. But under no circumstances is any of it to go to the reader.”
Even if you think the publishers were justified in their stance, it’s simply nonsense for anyone to claim that “there’s not much difference in cost between producing an ebook and a physical book.” And it’s risible nonsense if you spent at least a decade consuming official publisher sadface about how they hated to keep raising prices but darnit, printing costs just keep going up.
————
* Yeah, I got the year wrong in my previous comment. It wasn’t 2011 after all.
@Jim Henley,
Fair enough. From what I’ve read, it seems like everyone has a differently wrong view of how the publishing industry works. Ellen Kushner quoting David Hartwell: “If this were a science, we’d all be rich!”
@Soon Lee:
Certainly, there’s plenty of room in the corner. It’s quite spacious here.
I was not previously aware of Eggcorn Database, but, thanks to you, now I am!
Much appreciated. It looks like I have a new timesink!
1) MILLIONS STAYED HOME. “The first Star Wars film to be released in China was The Phantom Menace in 1999” Well, there’s your problem right there.
– – – – –
Jim Henley: “Here’s where I continue boring you all” Not at all!
– – – – –
Soon Lee. That Eggcorn Database you link to includes examples and comments on the word “firstable”. Can I claim dibs on “fifthable”?
(ETA: Apparently “The Fifth-Able” is a My Little Pony character or reference. Curses!)
(7) MORE ON FANFIC. – I appreciate any writing on Mass Effect that doesn’t devolve into complaints about ME3’s ending, and I like how they decided to be constructive about it.
(7/8) EBOOK PRICING. – Oh come on. What industry is there that does not charge a premium for early access? What industry is there that does not result in the distributor taking an amount more than their costs – are publishers non-profits or something? Are the price of goods directly related to the costs of manufacture and distribution? If so, please let any smartphone manufacturer know that.
In many markets, it’s easy to substitute goods, and as such undercut these sort of practices – you see it in things like shaving blades and mobile phone accessoties, because it’s easy to substitue Gillete’s blades or iPhone chargers. Similarly for services – frex taxis vs Uber
Books are not easily substitutable goods. Son of the Black Sword is not The Winds of Winter. The markets do not completely overlap, much less those who would be willing to pay more for early access. Would there be a price point at which I wouldn’t buy tWoW? Yes. But I assure you, (a) it’s pretty high, and (b) I’m not gonna buy another cheaper book as a substitute.
Gah. Green makes some good points, but she lets the whole MGC anti-tradpub preconceptions and evangelism get in her way.
Also, just for some actual data that does not depend on Stuff Someone on FB told me:
Biggest Book Trends: Print Is Back, and Everyone’s Reading Science Fiction
@Jim, @Soon Lee
Heh. This reminds me of something from when Scalzi’s Deal was announced, where someone brilliantly said that as per fannish mathematics, this meant that he now had enough money to buy Scotland or some such.
Today I am in the middle of Chuck Wendig’s “Empyrean Skies” trilogy. I’m liking it. I guess it’s technically YA (and Chuck’s famous employment of Anglo-Saxon slang is absent b/c of that), but it’s great world-building. Real page-turners.
(6) This news is so big it’s escaped the column! Textum Abscondium!
(7.2) It’s called “capitalism”, Amanda. It’s always worked that way. Perhaps your little Facebook pals should read up on economics.
(8) For me, the pull quote from the JMS interview was where he said, “a lot of television science fiction is either written by, or aimed at, guys who are afraid of girls.” And then the rest of that paragraph, regarding gimmicks vs. character, and sexuality. I think he could have omitted the word “television”, although publishers are probably a little better at dealing with “controversial” topics than TV networks.
(9) Shorter Sandifer: why bother?
@Jim: I’m curious about the statement that authors get 1/8th (12.5%) of the cover price. I once said “8%” to a mass-market PB author who said they would have been very pleased to get that much; I recall seeing figures on some monster book that said royalties would start at 8% and slide upwards after some tens of thousands of copies were sold.
I also suspect your analysis of e-book economics, simply because I’ve heard too many stories about Amazon funding its discounts by demanding discounts much larger than 50%-of-cover from publishers; was Amazon really willing to eat its own margin (as I read your numbers as limited by this formatting), or was it saying “We won’t sell your book for more than $10 \and/ we won’t sell it at all if you charge us more than $<<10”?
[ticky]
(6) PEN HONORS ROWLING.
Wow, that’s just a bit of format fail.
gah forgot box
@Chip Hitchcock: Yes, Amazon has always been willing to eat their profit margin when it’s helpful to their overall goals (owning ALL THE BOOKS, world domination, a volcano lair for Bezos, whatever).
They’re also willing to play hardball as they did in the “No, Hatchette, we won’t sell ANY of your books if you’re pricing the ebook so high.”
They’re perfectly ready to use their 2000 lb. gorilla status on publishers. The Evil Tor-Mcmillan Cabal wanted $11.99 for Scalzi’s latest in ebook. More than Amazon really likes (they’re of the opinion that no ebook should be over $9.99). So they discounted the hardback to 4 cents less than the ebook. Guess which pre-order I changed? It’s scootched back up to the hardcover being more than the ebook, but they knew most of the copies would sell in the first week or two.
@Chip Hitchcock:
Mass-market royalty rates are indeed less than typical rates for hardcovers. I specified hardcovers for that reason.
People hear a lot of stories. But stories you hear about how Amazon funds discounts have literally nothing to do with the value of the PPPB+returns reserve on a typical $28 hardcover book.
The former. This dispute was a really big deal in 2010 among people who were paying attention to it. I can believe that you were not such a person then, and there’s no reason you should have been. But it does mean your speculations now are uninformed.
ETA: Toy models always deal in approximations. These particular approximations were judged “about right” by someone in a position to know back then who took the opposite view of the dispute from me. And the wiggle room in the components don’t get you anywhere near Green’s claim that the pubs get “the vast majority” of money from book sales.
If the Straczynski interview left you wanting more, here is a three hour interview from a year or two ago.
Thie broken formatting makes today’s title weirdly appropriate.
In these monetary discussions I keep seeing the publisher’s contribution referred to as “paper, printing, binding, and freight,” with a nod to keeping the lights on, and anything else on their end being PROFIT. Often excluded are editing, copy editing, interior design (both print and electronic, which are different), formatting (ditto), cover art, cover design, interior art (including cartography) and publicity (including the in-house web store, as well as someone setting up interviews, sending out ARCs and press releases, and arranging signing events). Also involved are salespersons, marketing people, promotional materials, and somewhere in a dark basement is an accountant or three, trying to keep all of the gears turning. And there are probably several other people in roles I don’t know about.
Authors turn in a manuscript, not a book. It takes a brigade to produce a book, every member of which must be paid.
Also licensing, when someone decides to start every chapter with a Beatles lyric, and legal, when they’re sued for defamation by the author’s ex-boyfriend’s brother.
One time, one freaking time! And only the alpha readers ever saw it. *grumble*
YOU KNEW BETTER! Who do you think you are, Stephen King?!
No, just someone writing a revenge fic about my ex-boyfriend’s brother.
Jim has beaten me to most of the stuff here, but:
Somewhat true, but incomplete. E-book royalties from Amazon can range from 30% to 70%, depending on the price of the book. Between $2.99 and $9.99, it’s usually 70% to the rightsholder, 30% if priced below OR above that range.
Amazon was absolutely willing to eat its own margin, and was also saying that they didn’t want the publisher to set the price above $9.99, hence the larger discount. Publishers thought it might degrade the perceived value of books, and pushed for the higher price. This is known as the agency model of pricing, and there have been some very large antitrust lawsuits over it. See:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/04/11/what-is-agency-pricing/
and
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/04/14/what_the_amazon_harpercollins_deal_means_for_e_book_pricing_and_publishing.html
Where you may also be confused is that Amazon will often deal with authors directly as publishers. To them, a rightsholder is a rightsholder.
Take me down to the Pixel city, where the girls are green, and the Scrolls are pretty.
(Inspired by Captain Kirk, of course.) 😉
It was, rather, wasn’t it!
There seems to have been some format coding in the text I picked up from the press release that I could not remove (or even see) in MS Word, or in the WordPress editing window.
I have just retyped the text and deleted the imported section. That had occurred to me earlier, but I was determined to take the more time-consuming lazy man’s route….
(2) EYE CANDY
Some great covers in there, but the twinkly stars background on that page gave me flashbacks to the 90s rtaher than the 50s.
(6) PEN HONORS ROWLING
Now I know what a real run-on sentence looks like.
(7) MORE ON FANFIC
While there’s a step between writing fanfic and writing original work, surely at its best it’s quite close to writing either licenced in-universe fiction, or writing for an established TV series, etc? I’m not a writer, but John’s argument that it gives you practice in a fair chunk of the necessary writing skills – and free feedback too! – makes a lot of sense to me.
(7) EBOOK PRICING
Some good figures from Jim Henley, thank you Jim.
Where Amanda goes wrong is that she identifies a market segment based on (as Aaron says) her FB friends, and then assumes it’s the most important one for the publishers to hit, where as (as Soon Lee points out) there’s a Dutch Auction approach where they go for those prepared to pay premium prices first. As that market segment prepared to pay those prices clearly still exists, when Green bemoans that a bunch of corporations dedicated to making money are adopting tactics designed to make them more money, she just sounds rather confused about basic economics.
(7) EBOOK PRICING
Thanks for the information, Jim. I do remember the conflict back in 2011, and how you very definitively took that opposing position at the time. Publishing is such a weird and strange black art of a business, its a miracle anything ever gets published consistently. It’s not making Spacely Sprockets, that’s for sure.
As Christie upstream said:
“Authors turn in a manuscript, not a book. It takes a brigade to produce a book, every member of which must be paid.”
And in the Tradpub versus Selfpub front, those self publishing types are doing ALL of the things Christie mentioned. Or, more often, aren’t doing those things, often to the detriment of the final product. Just as the smallest example, consider how much support, or lack thereof, JCW’s publisher gave him in sending him to Worldcon last year.
Thanks for everyone making the bated & publisher comments so I don’t have to…
I know some people in publishing, and they would laugh at the idea of the money they were making, if they didn’t cry first. (“How do you make a small fortune in publishing? Start with a large fortune”)
It’s easy to look at some bestselling author and moan about the money the publisher is making from them. But most books aren’t bestsellers, most make a loss or only a very small profit for the publisher. Because, as everyone above points out, the publisher does not get everything not paid out in royalties, and the publisher has fixed costs beyond the cost of actually printing a book.
@Christie Yant: Since I introduced PPPB into the discussion, I think it’s reasonable to assume your criticism is aimed at me. If so, you’re missing some important issues: 1) I was explicitly doing the gross-profit calculation in the first instance. Gross profit has a specific definition and the various aspects of book production you go on to list don’t figure into it. I was also specifically looking at the unit model. 2) In my first post about how Amanda S. Green was wrong, I specifically called out SG&A expenses as eventually coming out of the publisher’s cut. Literally nobody in this thread is imagining there are no costs to turning a manuscript into a book.
Anyone ever play with Google’s “visually similar” image search? Got a couple this morning that are pure pulpy gold.
Link 1
Link 2
One of those results lead to this especially nice blog post, featuring an excellent cover for Campbell’s Who Goes There that I’ve never seen before.
Mike I’m still getting weird formatting on a different platform from last night.
May I suggest dumping press releases to .txt before reintroducing them to formatting in the future?
(7) EBOOK PRICING.
Clearly Green’s literary influences include the plays what Ernie Wise wrote.
Some might remember the discussion we had here a few days ago on the Grand Prix d’Angoulême, the French Comics festival who attracted widespread protests for putting forward a list of all-male nominees.
The havoc was such they had to renounce to their nominees list, and go for an all open nomination system to elect the three finalists. Here there are :
– Hermann
– Alan Moore
– Claire Wendling
I am glad to see Hermann and Alan Moore there, they are formidable authors.
I don’t know Claire Wendling, but I guess I am glad for a women to be there after all of this fuss, and I wish her the best.
I am less glad to learn that she is there as the result of an active online campaign. I guess Angoulême gets to learn what Hugo voters are now familiar with : open, first past the post voting systems are super sensitive to campaigning.
http://www.greatestcomicbook.com/blog/?tag=Chapter+5
I hope for the best for this award, in a year where it is not even sure any of the nominees will accept it :
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2016/01/24/hermann-will-accept-the-angouleme-grand-prix-if-offered-to-him/
I hope 2017 will be a better year.
+1 BLP
It comes up fine in Chrome for Desktop, but for Android the whole thing is getting squeezed into 40% of the screen. Not an issue with other posts, and re-sizes OK, but it’s vaguely annoying.
Only vaguely, probably not worth spending serious time on.
@Jim Henley: Thank you for your comment about costs of hardbacks. That was very informative.
In PPPB, do editing and typesetting costs get rolled into “printing” or are they separate? Specifically I am wondering if PPPB costs include parts that apply to e-books (as editing obviously would and typesetting probably would) or if they are unique to paper.
Also it seems reasonable to me that retailer costs would be lower with e-books than p-books (don’t need to dust the stock; inventory would (I think) become a more automated process; the store doesn’t need vacuuming as often, etc.) Retailer costs + profit appear to be 50% of the hardback price (for large chain retailers) and I’m wondering how that would be affected by e versus p. If you have any rule-of-thumb estimates on that I would be very interested to read them.
Vivien:
Thank you for the update! Also happy about Hermann and Moore. I haven’t read anything by Claire Wendling that I can remember, but I look forward to meeting her at Worldcon 75 where she is guest of honour. Will try to find what she has published in english before that.
Peter J: “All men are fools, and what makes them so is having beauty like what I have got.”
James Worrad:
(eminently suitable for this venue):
BTW, I’m sure a few news outlets will mention it, but tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of the Challenger explosion.