Smart Bitch Test Driver Liz has a major beef with St. Martin’s Macmillan. Have a look.
How To Lose Sales And Really Enrage Readers, St. Martin’s / Macmillan Style
How do you take someone who loves Lisa Kleypas so much she read first person contemporary romance in hardcover and make her unable to discuss the shiny new release Tempt Me At Twilight without resorting to the type of language that requires the ingestion of a soap bar? (Because if this conversation included video, you would see the bubbles frothing out of my mouth right now. It’s entirely possible that steam is coming out of my ears, but I’m too blinded by anger to look.) As it turns out, it’s incredibly simple. All you need to do is show utter contempt for her most loyal readers through an astonishingly cynical cash grab.
Don’t believe me? Wonder if I also think we’re living in End Times? Oh, stay with me. You’ll need the soap too.
During the media blitz for Tempt Me At Twilight the price of $14.99 was floated. This led to the very natural assumption that the book was probably going to be a trade paperback. Since Lisa Kleypas’s last two books were hardcover – a great deal right? Then, when the loyal reader of Ms. Kleypas is offered the e-book at $9.99 (or $12.99 depending on your e-tailer) it seems like something you can swallow. Sure, it’s more than a mass market, but it’s not as much as a hardcover and you won’t have to wait a year to read one of your favorite authors. Ok, let’s buy it!! So you do. And then you go to Target to buy some Cheerios. Cereal is cheaper there and we’re all watching our money these days.
Wait – why is Tempt Me At Twilight on the shelf as a mass market? With a list price of $7.99? And a sale sticker making it $5.99? What the (buy extra soap, here’s where you start needing it) um, heck is going on here? You might, if you bought it from Sony, rush home to find out why Sony was cheating you. You might find that all the e-tailers have this price listed. In any other world, you’d return the overpriced product and stop shopping at that store. But e-books cannot be returned. You realize that Ms. Kleypas is most likely not making an additional cent due to this pricing structure but the publisher will be earning an extra $4 to $7 per e-book due to a deliberate increase in price for the right to have a copy of the book that did not need to be bound, shipped, shelved or returned and that cannot be traded, loaned or donated. Sure, we could argue about if hardcovers cost the same as trades cost the same as paperbacks but it’s pretty hard to tell me that a highly restricted digital copy is worth twice as much as a traditional paper copy released on the same day. In short, the publisher has extended a finger one does not use in polite company to e-book readers and author loyalists.
Here. Have another bar of Ivory. You get used to the taste.
The fluid pricing of digital books is a long-standing topic of much ire and frustration, as Jane at Dear Author wrote last December, and it’s still fluid, it’s still frustrating, and it’s still pissing otherwise devoted digital readers off.
Which is exactly what DRM is. Snake oil that extracts money from publishers.
Paying for it is entirely up to them. Maybe they have some authors than demand it – so in that case, charge the authors.
Otherwise, nothing is stopping them selling open format books themselves directly and completely removing this cost.
I love my Kindle. Lisa Kleypas’s Tempt Me at Twilight was the first time I saw a Kindle e-book priced higher than a paperback (usually the e-version is $1-$2 cheaper). I was furious (even more than I was when I had to wait a few weeks before Eloisa James’s last release was offered in e-version).
I purchased my Kindle to be “green,” figuring I’d eventually recapture the $349 cost by saving $1-$2 at a time on my purchase.
But I was furious with St. Martin’s for charging MORE for an e-version. So what did I do?
I bought my copy at BJ’s. It was $4.99—$3 cheaper than the list price and $5 less than the e-version.
So thanks for helping me help the environment, St. Martin’s. Next time I’ll buy it at a used book store and neither you nor Ms. Kleypas (whom I love BTW) will get a red cent from me.
Ditto on the remarks about not going digital. I had planned on buying myself a Kindle for my birthday, but I just can’t stomach paying that much money for the Kindle then paying MORE for the books and having to wait to get the books. Too many cons and not enough pros.
@ Delilah –
Connecting overcharging to combating piracy or recouping pirated revenue is a false argument – that’s a road the music industry already went down, and they discovered that meeting fair pricing standards drew people away from piracy. (In fact, it’s a lesson they had to learn over again, because every time a new technology comes out something like this plays out.)
Yes, there is e-book piracy – but the proven answer to reducing it is to set up a system consumers view as fair and transparent. Most people will pay for their product and a huge % of those that won’t never would – because they are dishonest by nature and were never your customer. The only way to stop piracy is to stop having product. Even paper books are stolen and reproduced.
How does Netflix handle digital downloads? How did Amazon remove a purchased book from everyone’s Kindle simultaneously? The technology is there, it works in other digital markets. The business model exists and is apparently quite popular and successful. Why not add e-books to the mix somehow?
I know the author probably had nothing to do with this, but did you forward your complaints to her anyway? Maybe if she knows her readers are disgruntled, she’ll do something about it, if possible.
A couple of points that may shed some light on this.
First – DRM or not is not always the publishers choice. I know a publisher who wanted to sell no-DRM books, and the store said they only handle DRM’d books.
Second, don’t forget that you are not the publisher’s customers. The distributors and big book chains are. Yes, if they annoy you enough, you won’t buy any more books, and this will impact them eventually, but they don’t have to keep you happy from day to day. The people they have to keep happy right now are about a half dozen buyers for the big guys. As long as these people control 80-90 percent of the purchases from a given publisher, the publisher is going to do what they want.
These buyers have a vested interest in not having ebooks succeed. If their store sells only paper books, then to them they are only competition. Even if their store sells e-books as well, e-books don’t have to go through the buying process – there is no downside to hosting every ebook available and you don’t have to decide ahead of time how many you need.
I used to be rabidly anti eBook, for a couple of reasons, including the price of readers, and the DRM on books. I hate DRM like whoa, and while yeah, I could crack it like an egg, it doesn’t mean I want to encourage companies to use it. But then in July my husband and I moved… and we packed up upwards of 15 boxes of books, and that wasn’t even a full half of our collection.
Suddenly, being able to carry 300 books on an item I could fit in my purse became VERY attractive. And then Sony put out a reasonably priced (in my opinion) eBook reader in my favorite color (pink!) and I was sorely, sorely tempted. But like so many others I am just frustrated by the ridiculous inconsistency in eBook pricing. I’d be happy if eBooks were just like a consistent percentage cheaper… say 50% cheaper on hardbacks, and 20% cheaper than paperbacks.
Still, once my husband and I are working again I’m sure we’ll both buy Sony readers, but I’ll be very picky about how much I pay for ebooks. In the long run though, I feel confident that the eBook prices will equalize, just like MP3s did, so it’s worth investing in the reader.
Before you buy at B & N or Amazon, try http://www.deepdiscount.com
I buy 90% of my books and videos there because they are cheaper and there is no S/H.
As an eBook author, I think the price gouging the big companies are trying to get readers to pay is unconscionable .
I’ve written a “Dear Publisher” letter based on this – http://www.di2.nu/200910/01.htm
Up thread someone mentioned Ilona Andrews new release, and some else mentioned Baen’s ‘no geographical restrictions policy’.
This one recently bit me. I have ordered On The Edge as a PB from BookDepository.
I also wanted the ebook, a, because I want to read it NOW dammnit, and b, because I loan my PB’s out to hook other people.
Went to BooksOnBoard and discovered that while the PB cost me £5, to buy it as a drm’d ebook was going to cost me £13 at the UK site versus $9.50 at the US.
I was so enraged, I haven’t bought it in eform at all. I’ll wait for the PB.
@liz m – notice I said that may be the publishers argument and I didn’t agree with it. Most file hosting sites only require the owner of the copyright to contact them to remove it. So using that as an argument – is frankly stupid.
@Gwynnyd = to answer your question – Netflix uses a proprietery viewer – that accesses the file on their server. Amazon through the wi-fi connection they have with the Kindle can do that – they also have a proprietery program that allows the Kindle versions to only be read on a Kindle. BUT there are other readers. eBookreader, Sony eBook Reader, and a couple of new ones that are in the works that don’t have wifi built in.
In case anyone missed my point – I disagree with the increase cost because of piracy argument – it doesn’t hold water. I disagree with publishers paying the same royalties for eBooks as print books. Charging more for an eBook is just a crappy way of making more money off folks that would rather carry a couple hundred books in one easy to manage device than paper books that can be heavy.