why don’t you just write your book, offer it online as a free pdf (or for a small fee or donation), offer it also as a pod book, and through the pod, put it eventually on ingram for global distribution.

i’ve been dabbling in online and offline publishing for a long time. my latest scheme is to set up a colophon (basically a publishing house ‘lite’). if you are interested, you write your book and i can take it from there (or we could share tasks). let’s see what happens. it wouldn’t be like random house, though it might seem random.

and i think i’ll also mention something to g.i.horton.

1) “Charge less if the reader is willing to wait” will never work. No one would use the cheaper/free Amazon shipping options if their projected wait time was an extra 5 days to 7 months, depending on how many other people decided to order the books they were interested in.

You can’t look to Netflix here, because the customer isn’t going to be sent another book while they wait for the one they want. And if they are, well, then we’ve just re-invented the Book of the Month Club.

2) Almost nobody is interested in a $15 pdf. If they were, e-books would already be selling like literary flapjacks. They’re not. Last time I checked, audio books sold better. And who the hell buys audio books?

A really groovy e-reader might up the number of sales a little bit, particularly if Appple did one, but until we’re taught to read on screens, most people will still want their books in ink.

Give e-books away for free to promote the hardcover. Give up on making a profit on them. Just give the damn things away already! Either in chapter size bits on the web or in their entirety with purchase of the hardcover. I haven’t checked in on Baen books lately, but they really nailed this with their free e-library a few years back.

3) Publishers have been talking about using technology to get rid of the “current retailing middlemen” since at least the advent of the CD-ROM. It won’t happen & it shouldn’t happen. People hanging out at a B&N are a captive audience. Don’t lose them. Hell, just having a legion of cyclopean B&Ns looming over the mini-malls gives the book industry a level of exposure that just didn’t exist back in the days of the independent bookseller. Trying to build up the publishing industry by knocking down B&N won’t work.

4) There’s no reason that two (or 12) books-about-books shouldn’t be written and available in some sort of form on the web. There’s a very good reason a publisher shouldn’t release one when another’s just come out, though: the advance. It won’t earn back quickly if the market is “saturated” when a book hits the market.

Tell publishers you’ll forgo your advance payment and they may be more interested in obtaining an “instant backlist” title that will slowly generate revenue for both you & them over the years. You may want to leave your agent out of this discussion.

4)” The internet is not the enemy of books, authors, publishers, and ideas.” Too true. There are many things that need to change in order to make the industry more appealing to my fellow 21st-century-digital-boys & girls. I’d particularly like to see the demise of the now largely irrelevant distinction between the US/UK market.

But at the same time, book publishers shouldn’t try to become web publishers. They need to use the net to find nifty ways to sell their sliced up, ink stained, bundles of bark, not ape the business model of whatever nifty web startup that’s captured our hearts and minds this week.

G.L. Horton

The problem with most e-books is the pricing doesn’t take into account that no physical book exists….thus none of the old-ommerce distribution costs. You end up with a digital book that costs almost as much as a physical one and no way to pass it on to someone else. If you can’t pass it on then an e-book should cost maybe 20% of the costs of a hardbound book.

People have been offering faster delivery at extra cost since well before the Internet. The U. S. Postal Service offered premium delivery back when it was the U. S. Post Office. People will pay for faster delivery when they are convinced it is worth it.

All Jeff is doing is suggesting that publishing firms offer what other companies are already offering.

i’m guessing that you have never managed a manufacturing concern. i have. inventory production and management (of physical goods, not digital) can’t simply be dismissed by saying “jack up the price” (e.g. by gouging folks on delivery costs.) otherwise, it would make perfect sense to build huge inventories of say, very high end jewelry, and of course it doesn’t. for the resources needed to get to market and stay there cause failure long before the volume of sales activity — no matter how high margin — justify the entire exercise.

Jeff, please either write the book quickly or send off copies to the publishing houses’ editors / stock-holders. These ideas could’ve been implemented eight years ago, and Lord knows, I wish they had! Here in China, the majority of English-language books are badly typeset “classics” and practically nothing bothers including marginalia, appendixes, or notes.

I tried to buy a book online from Ballantine, only to be told that I couldn’t buy an ebook since I wasn’t in the US. Huh? One of the problems I have is that Ballantine just isn’t getting distribution for their books in Canada. So I try to buy an e-book, which is essentially all profit to them, but I can’t. Some BS contract implications about foreign rights and what rights the ebook people have… Idiotic. Same as how shows on iTunes are released (for free!) only to US and not Canadian iTunes, where you need a US credit card to access free content.

Far too many media companies just are not crafting their internet presence to take advantage of its characteristics and are grafting on the detritus of the offline world. There are reasons why everyone used to have subsidiaries all over the world, different rights, etc. Those reasons don’t exist or are dieing, but everyone does the charade to appease them, rather than thinking about what they are trying to do. Frustating as all hell. Not surprising given that media is a business run by English Majors and Lawyers (but I repeat myself).