Rather than publishers doing the price, larger stores could drive all their competition out of the business, and when you have no where else to go, bring the prices up.
If you look at their publishers guidelines, they have done a very thorough job of ensuring nothing
other than a publisher in the most traditional form of the term will be permitted.
In other words, the pie is a lot
large than publishers think, because they are only measuring some of it.
Guess what, we're probably going to be more willing to take a chance on those titles
than another publisher who is only offering net 30 [1].
We could not, however, continue with them as the cost of obtaining permission was
higher than the publisher was prepared to pay.
Our goal was to sell 150,000 copies in six months and 1.5 We didn't quite meet our initial goals, yet we sold much more
than our publisher estimated.
The explanation comes down to nothing more
than publishers trying to keep up in a difficult market, while costs and ease of ebook production became manageable.
Now readers have more
power than publishers and authors can become known without a publisher's endorsement or imprint on their book.
So it was more of a case of the publisher not having a valid right to publish those books in the first place, rather
than a publisher changing their minds.
Libraries have two fundamental problems here: they have less control over the
situation than publishers do, and they are about to get some serious competition from the private sector.
These days, it's not uncommon for self - published authors to know more about metadata and how to market a
work than publishers do.
By the same token, high profile Christian authors receive lucrative royalties, while some popular pastors serve as their own sales forces, far more
successfully than any publisher's sales forces.
That and making Amazon strong enough and dominant enough to withstand attacks from Publishers and other elements — ones that are
worse than Publishers because they don't really care about readers or reading.
But — unlike my publishers, they have been reliable, timeous payers (far
faster than the publishers), transparent in their accounting, and responsive to my e-mails.
People are publishing books on their own because they choose to — because they see opportunities in the market and want a bigger share of the pie
than publishers offer; because they want full control of their book; for some, because they just want a relic of their work to share with friends and family.
It is also remarkable that while the share of the traditional publishing houses (including the Big 5) falls (probably partly due to the publishers artificially keeping the prices high), the indie market grows: individual authors sell more ebooks daily on
Amazon than the publishers with ISBN put together.
Authors generally received an even larger share
than the publisher for non-print rights (such as stage and screen rights) and foreign rights.
Actually, Kickstarter is more like a
retailer than a publisher, a place where people put up their money and get a comic in return.
When introduced last night, EA CEO Andrew House stressed that this was far
earlier than the publisher usually shows any game in development — a point emphasised by the mighty red bar of «Prototype Gameplay» seen in the footage.