Simon & Schuster to delay eReleases four months from Hardcover publication
examiner.com
examiner.com
The traditional pattern of book-selling is a reverse auction.
First you sell the limited edition short print run signed gilt-trimmed hardcover. (Optional.) $35
Then you sell the regular hardcover. (Optional.) $25, discount to $16.
Then you sell the trade paperback. (Optional.) $16, discount to $10.
Then you sell the mass-market paperback. (Optional only if you're a small press.) $8, discount to $5.
If it's a mega-bestseller, then you sell the cheap MMPB edition, discount down to $3 in quantities of 100K and up.
Each of these steps occurs in sequence, typically 6 or 12 months apart. Some or all may be ommitted -- most books only go through 2, sometimes 3 of these stages -- but the general pattern is that the price comes down as the early adopters are soaked up by the expensive editions.
It's an established business model and it worked in the traditional book business because books effectively come with built-in DRM; who in their right mind borrows a hardcover and photocopies it?
If you read HN I'm going to take it as read (heh) that you understand why this model is fundamentally broken when you try to apply it to soft goods, as Hachette's execs seem to be bent on trying.
(Full disclosure: I am published by a Hachette subsidiary in the UK, and I'm contractually required to not saw off the branch I'm sitting on.)
Most American households buy around 1 book a year.
Roughly 50% of books are sold to just 2-3% of the market.
There's a power law at work (with, admittedly, a cut-off at the high end). I know quite a few folks who typically buy and read 50-150 novels a year. To make a runaway best-seller, you need to reach out to the 1-book-a-year folks, but to stay in business you've got to keep the 50-books-a-year people happy, because those are your core market.
Regularly reading fiction for entertainment is, these days, a niche market.
If publishers sold direct to the public, doing something like starting ebooks at $20 and then depreciating them by 5% per month to a floor of $2 would be practical. But they sell via distributors such as B&N, Fictionwise, Diesel, and the Kindle store, and I've got a horrible feeling (I need to do some digging to confirm this ...) that what they sell these stores is a right to sell X units of book Y, for a fixed price minus a wholesale discount. (Which would mirror how they do things with physical books, hence plugging in to their accounting system ...)
Wow, that says it all about as succinctly as anyone can. I can't tell if this is cluelessness or desperation.
Also, people will often do translations of popular books (c.f Harry Potter) before the publisher gets around to it.
If I want to buy your book, and you don't want to sell me your book, that's fine -- I'll buy someone else's book. I've chewed through about 40 novels on my Kindle already, but its not like I'm in imminent danger of running out if I can't buy yours. (The only people I see this working out for are "event" book such as, e.g., the Harry Potters of the world.)
And now that they found that prized audience what they're doing is telling them "Go away! Come back when we're ready for you."
This is an incredibly hostile move to S&S's new, or lesser known, authors who depend on the first big wave of publicity and reviews to sell books. The well known S&S authors will fare better but will probably still experience some fallout. The bigger losers are S&S's best customers. The ones who buy lots of books, stay up on new releases, and do tons of free marketing by recommending books to friends & family.