Crunched By The Numbers

"This chart illustrates very clearly something that agents have been arguing for several years now, and that publishers have been saying just isn’t true: that their savings on printing, binding and distribution make up for the lower revenue from lower e-book prices– and that increased profitability is coming entirely off the backs of authors.

     Look at Harper’s own numbers: $27.99 hardcover generates $5.67 profit to publisher and $4.20 royalty to author $14.99 agency priced e-book generates $7.87 profit to publisher and $2.62 royalty to author.
     So, in other words, at these average price points, every time a hardcover sale is replaced by an e-book sale, the publisher makes $2.20 more per copy and the author makes $1.58 less. If the author made the same $4.20 royalty on the e-book sale as he/she would have on a hardcover, the publisher would STILL be making an improved profit of $6.28."
— Brain DeFiore, AARdvark
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"I was inspired to write this post by a couple of recent articles lamenting how the e-book revolution is making things tougher on authors: a WSJ article about the plight of authors, and a Futurebook description of a panel discussion about the future of books. My first thought was that the e-book revolution has increased my sales and income almost a thousandfold (OK, so it wasn’t very high to begin with!), and that the lower costs of e-books, the worldwide digital distribution they afford me, and the ability to reach readers without going through layers of middlemen (publishers and agents) has allowed me to price my e-books competitively and sell more books in a month than I used to in a decade. How can this be bad?"
— David Derrico, David Derrico.com
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Curvature of the Spine

Photo: design345

"With the e-book revolution upending the publishing business, Madeline McIntosh, the president of sales, operations and digital for Random House, stood at the lectern on the opening day [of the Columbia Publishing Course] in June, projecting a slide depicting the industry as a roller coaster, its occupants frozen in motion at the top of a steep loop.
[...]'You never know what’s going to happen,' Carolyn Pittis, the senior vice president of global author services at HarperCollins, told a packed room of students several days into the course. 'So it’s very exciting for those of us who spent many years when a lot of things didn’t happen.'
[...] In the past year, e-books have skyrocketed in popularity, especially in genre fiction like romance and thrillers. For some new releases, the first week has brought more sales of electronic copies than of print copies."— Julie Bosman, The New York Times
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