If I did this for a 10% cut of any sales, then the ebook could be sold for $2 and the author would take $1.80 and I would take $0.20 per copy.

All that blather about an ebook requiring extensive marketing and sales is just that – blather! I used to write the marketing materials which the marketers would simply use directly! How is that value-adding? I would write the sales materials and the sales emails and they would be used directly! No value-adding there!

I see editors/writers who can pick up some design and marketing skills as the natural successor to the large publishing house. Their expertise lies in running a distribution network. Eventually they’ll outsource design, editorial, marketing, sales, etc and focus on their core business. Only people who have sold 10, 000 ebooks will be able to get in the door … and the royalty agreement will need to be higher than a paltry 10%.

The days of the middleman taking huge chunks of money are fast coming to an end.

I’m talking to you, marketing air-heads.

Getting books into the hands of readers at reasonable prices is in the best interest of both publishers and writers. Failing to adapt to changing markets and technologies does no one any good.

Baen sells ebooks at $4-6 each (or $15 for the eARC available in rough before the paper edition). It has been doing so for about 10 years now. I’m pretty sure it’s making a good deal of money doing so. If other publishers can’t sell ebooks at $6 each and make a profit then they are doing something wrong.

$6 each allows Baen – if they wanted to – to sell via Amazon to Kindle readers for $10 and make more money I think

Those costs do not disappear – but they are ALREADY SPENT to prepare the hardback (or paperback) book. Said book came from a word processing file, probably even MSWord or something similar, and that’s 98% of the work when making an eBook. The publisher DOES NOT pay yet another set of editors and proodreaders and so on to create an eBook from the WP file.

“Can publishers cut out the middlemen and sell ebooks cheaper direct to the readers? Only in some Land of Oz where readers patiently troll the Internet for indie pubs and where readers patiently submit their Paypal or credit card in a dozen different places to buy the books they can get with a quickie one-click at Amazon.com. ”

Actually there are any number of choices for retail sales. Fictionwise has been mentioned, and eReader.com, and eBooks, and many others. A Google search will turn up pages and pages of them. Baen Books, a small but mainstream publisher of Science Fiction and Fantasy, uses Webscriptions.net. More about them to come.

“If you kill the golden goose (higher ebook prices) you also kill us evil, money-grubbing publishers (who are already surviving on slim profit margins). And despite all rosy, utopian dreams of authors publishing and marketing their own work successfully, the fact remains that the average author needs a publisher in order to produce a professionally vetted book that is marketed in a reasonably high-profile way.”

Unlike some few, I do not espouse the Individual Self-Publishing paradigm. I’m not certain I read any posts from anyone who does. That’s a straw man argument.

“And somewhere in that process, there has to be an ebook price that pays the bills.”

The dead-tree books are paying the bills – eBooks are pizza money on top of that. Are there people who make a choice between eBooks and TreeBooks? Yes, there are. But they aren’t lost sales – they weren’t going to buy the Hardcover anyway. What making the eBook available at a reasonable (low) price does for the publisher is put a copy of that book in the hands of a potential Treebook customer. It’s advertising.

I use eReader Book Studio (under $20 from eReader.com) to make eReader/Palm versions of my stories. I use Readerworks Publisher ($119 from OverDrive) to make the MSReader version. I use Mobipocket Creator (free) to make the Mobipocket Versions. I use OpenOffice to make the Rich Text Format, the Text format, and the Adobe PDF versions. HTML I make myself with NoteTabPro from Fookes Software.

For the versions with DRM, it takes a few mouseclicks to install. I don’t use it. Putting DRM – “copy protection” – on my files is the same as telling every reader, “I know you’re a thief, so I’m locking away your ability to migrate these files to another computer or program to read them with. If you try to give it to someone, I can prosecute you.” Would we tolerate the publisher telling us we couldn’t give the book to cousin Harvey after we’ve read it? Or selling it to a used bookstore?

The late publisher Jim Baen didn’t believe DRM was necessary. He looked on eBooks as advertising for the Treebooks, and it works. You hardly ever find Baen eBooks on peer-to-peer and similar sites, because it’s reasonably priced, and a big chunk is outright free!

Baen eBooks are typically $6.00, though some eARCs go for as high as $15. Even better, you can buy the monthly output from Baen for $15. That’s usually the eBook versions of 3 or 4 Hardbacks and 3 or 4 paperbacks, every month.

Has Baen gone bankrupt? Not only “No!” but the authors find their backlist selling at higher than normal rates as people read the older books as eBooks and want the Treebook in their hands.