Hmmmm lets see how we can change that, fast?

Case in point, which will make more money the best written book in the world or the one that oprah tells people to buy?

Yes content is important to people, but it’s primary role is to provide free marketing. Friend recommendations, win awards, etc. If it doesn’t generate this free marketing then it’s a fail. It’s not about selling to people who like your book, it’s about placing you book in places where people who don’t really like it will accidentally buy it.

In the above case your content is what gets you the oprah recommendation but your content is not why the book sells. That distinction is a big one.

One part of marketing is books on shelves, I suspect it is probably the major one. Ebooks mean publishers will lose ground to whomever distributes them. Since book publishers are at war with book sellers and creating a giant invisible book shop with more power than they can imagine is the last thing they want. I can’t see publishers ever willingly switching.

They will get replaced over time but it’s probably that the industry will shard into books and ebooks and authors will have to make a choice which side they are on. Do they want to deal with a real publisher who will actually do the marketing job? Or do they want to handle marketing themselves? After you hit success, sure a real publisher will offer to step in and “save you” but do you want them to?

This isn’t from the point of view of a writer BTW, this is from someone looking at the games industry and trying hard to find where the win is. I suspect there is a lot of parrallels, games are obviously switching to online distribution right now. I see some rather disgusting business entities making land grabs as I type.

I no longer expect anyone to pay for any primary content I might create, it’s role is marketing not revenue generation, my only hope of income is secondary content. In the case of books secondary content can be the dead tree version. This is fine for authors but it kinda puts you back where you started and useless for publishers who are already making money from the dead tree version.

Here’s a fun games thread about your possible future problems, http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=15697

Where having committed to a virtual marketplace, the marketplace suddenly drops the price of content by 50% and creators who where trying to live on 10 sales a day become sad as this doesn’t mean that they now get 20 sales.

They are a bit of a miserable bunch but it’s pretty much where I figured the casual games boom would go which is why I didn’t even try to jump on it. Well that and the whole creating games for retards is not somewhere I want to be. Even a win would be a fail.

I seem to have over commented again, I shall twitter a link to it, I’m bored of the concept of real bloging.

The price of that $26 hardback is tied up in the draconian deep discounts and return policy of booksellers. Take that $26 and remember that the bookstore is getting a discount of oh, say, 60%. Now we’re down to $10.40. Now remember that they have to offset a projected 1/3 of the print run back in returns and we’re down to $6.97. That’s $6.97 to make a profit, mind you.

So really, if you’re justifying it according to printing cost, we’re talking $5 per eBook *TOPS*. Yeah, there’s something else going on here for sure.

However, I’m not so bullish on them ever getting “big.” Healthy, yes. They serve a niche market with unique product–done well, they’re golden.

Growing into the next generation of large publishers? Not unless we suddenly have a culture shift that creates a lot more long-form, linear-narrative, fiction-centric readers.