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Over the years my work at IPG has given me experience with more than 500 different indie publishing companies ranging in size from very small to quite large. I am also the founder of a prosperous mid-sized house, Chicago Review Press, which now publishes 60-70 new titles a year.
In this post I make some observations … Read More »
IPG and Amazon have agreed on terms. As of Friday, May 25th, the 5,000 IPG Kindle titles that were taken down in late February have been put back up on the Amazon site, plus an additional 500 new Kindle titles prepared by IPG over the last three months have been added. To help make up … Read More »
Most of the blog posts put up in this space over the last two months have circled around three very major issues in regard to eBooks. Here they are, together with an account of what if any progress has been made in resolving each of them.
eBook Distribution: What’s the Deal?:
“No one who is really privy … Read More »
The word around the blogosphere assumes that publishers are angry about the state of the book marketplace because their superannuated business model is about to be blown away, and that’s a good thing because that old model makes books too expensive, excludes too many fine authors, and makes too much money for greedy owners. Most … Read More »
In the previous post, it was argued that the cost of the content of eBooks cannot be reduced much because the making of it is deeply artisanal in nature. Since content is in no deep sense digital, producing it at a high level cannot be automated, which is where important cost savings could have been … Read More »
The current controversy about the state of the eBook industry has been unproductive for a number of reasons. Much of the information out there on the blogs is just wrong—which should not come as a surprise because the book business is complicated. What’s surprising is the sour tone of so many of the comments on … Read More »
This post is a continuation of the previous, where co-op, advertising allowances, free freight, and other examples of discount creep were discussed.
Publishers are now increasingly paying authors a royalty based on net sales rather than a percentage of the list price of copies sold. Can a publisher add co-op fees, advertising allowances, and free freight … Read More »
Co-op used to be a bookseller’s charge to a book publisher or distributor to purchase special treatment for a particular title. “Give me $3000 and I will put your title on the new and notable table in 300 stores.” This evolved into something entirely different: “Give us 4% of your last-year sales with us for … Read More »
This post is the follow-up to the previous, which addressed what distributors do now at a time when printed books still dominate book sales, and will describe the role of distributors as the industry transitions to eBooks.
The advent of the eBook changes everything. Distributors are about to be disintermediated (a fancy way of saying put … Read More »
Will there be a need for book distributors in the age of electronic publishing?
This post will cover what distributors do now at a time when printed books still dominate book sales overall. The next post will describe the role of distributors as the industry transitions to eBooks.
For most of the forty years that book distributors … Read More »
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