Everyone Is Talking About It

… so maybe I will, too.

Yes, Amazon screwed up the public relations — you really should read John Scalzi’s excellent analysis of why, but as usual, skip the freakin’ comments.

I don’t really think that’s arguable. Everything outside of that is where things turn into a sort of wiggly, wobbly munge.

I think where I’m at is encapsulated well enough in my response to Jennifer Jackson’s question over on livejournal. I’ll mostly repeat what I said there, here, with some edits and expansion:

My take is I’m torn.

Amazon is right that prices on eBooks need to be lower, possibly vastly lower, to give them a real chance to take off.  Publishers generally have their heads up their asses on this point.

But I think Macmillan is right, too, in that the publishers should be free to set their prices. A competitive marketplace is going to reveal the flaw or lack thereof in the prices they choose to set.

I think most parties are deeply wrongheaded as far as the whole DRM thing goes, but that’s a big kettle of fish and I’m just looking for an appetizer-scale comment here.

Someone laid out a price model above as indicative of what (some) publishers are doing right now with books, along the lines of:

$7 for a paperback
$15 for an ebook
$20 for a hardcover

But that’s an incomplete listing.  Here’s what it’s more like:

$7 for a paperback released one year after the hardcover
$15 for an ebook released the same time as the hardcover
$20 for a hardcover released as the earliest available form of the product

Pricing isn’t just about format. It’s about availability and urgency. If you feel you MUST get your hands on “Changes” by Jim Butcher the first day it’s available, in an eBookless world you’d be spending that hardcover price, period, or you’d have to sit on your thumbs and wait a year for the paperback. It’s as simple as that.

The fact that there have been explicit statements from a few publishers in this kerfluffle that talk about sliding the ebook pricing scale around as the physical format options of a particular book become available makes sense, honestly, because of the urgency principle.  If you want the convenience of first-available access, you pay more, and you pay more because that author’s content is so valuable to you that you cannot wait for it to become available later in a cheaper form.  And one hopes that a hardcover/higher-pricing-period-eBook generates a proportionately larger payout for the author, since that’s who you’re (psychologically) supporting when you make an urgency rather than patience oriented purchase.

YES, some — even many — publishers have completely screwed the pooch on following the logic of this approach, pricing back catalog works at ridiculous levels.  People can and should be angry about that sort of stuff.  It’s just silly, and it’s going to hurt the form (but maybe the publishers want that, because the market hasn’t yet screamed “give us eBooks or go out of business” at them enough).

But let’s also remember eBooks in this format (kindle/iPad friendly) are still in their infancy.  Babies poo outside their diapers all the damn time, I can say from experience. But eventually they grow up and start to get it right more consistently.  It’s a matter of time and a matter of market pressures.

I’m going to be real interested to see what if any independent eBook marketplaces open up, ones oriented on getting good content from “unknown” authors available to voracious readers at a cheap and DRM-free pricepoint.  That’s where I think smaller, nimbler mammals are going to outstrip the dino-publisher set.  Whether or not the bigger guys will go extinct once something like that really gets rolling is the question.  Maybe, maybe not, but either way I’m hoping the environmental changes ahead teach the good ones how to survive — or present our favorite authors with ways to get it done themselves.

It may simply be a matter of time before a few reasonably big name authors decide that it’s time to buy into the new way of doing things, and do something really splashy — think about what’s happened with some music-makers after years of iTunes’ presence in the marketplace. “Pay whatever you think it’s worth including free” ala Radiohead, for example. Now, I don’t think that the music model works 100% with fiction — musicians go on tour and make a lot of their money through those ticket sales, rather than via albums, and there’s no easy analogue for that from the perspective of an author.  But imagine what happens if, say, Stephen King says: I’m gonna publish my next book myself, as an eBook, for five bucks (or one buck). You can buy it from my website.

Right now, the old way of doing things is still the dominant way of doing things. It’s going to take years more to get to where it becomes clear that the old way is built on what’s now a foundation of sand.  Until then, many successful authors are going to want to support the old way because the new way is hard, and because the publishing world is really very, very small and as an author you don’t want to piss off your friends and colleagues who’ve so far been a part of your success and will have a very palpable impact on your ability to get your works out there and selling.

As with so many things in publishing, though, the middle-man — whether you’re talking distribution or non-creator-owned publishing — is in trouble.  The middle man will continue to have some value over the years, though, as the guy/organization that is focused on reaching people and the selling and the skills that are involved in doing both effectively.  But those middlemen will eventually only have value to those creators who don’t, themselves, feel like they have or want to have those skills (or exercise the time to use them). Some will say this has already happened for a number of creators. They’re mostly right. But it’s not a widespread phenomenon yet.

And that’s a shift to where the middlemen are the clients of the creators, not the other way around.

Speaking to my personal experience, that’s pretty much exactly what Evil Hat did for Chad Underkoffler with Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies.  Chad didn’t want to deal with the business particulars of publication, so Evil Hat stepped in to do that job for him, for a cut. This is less a change of process than it is of perspective.  If you view Chad as Evil Hat’s client — we take on his content, we publish it, it’s “our” game that he happened to create — you’re old school.  New school says that Evil Hat is Chad’s client — he created his content, figured out what services he wanted us to provide, and we provided them for an agreed-upon price.

There’s very little that’s procedurally different between the two, but the change in the minds of those parties involved is a big deal. It changes the perspective on who is thought to be in control, and a hundred other things that tie into that.  And once someone feels like they have more control over their options, those options get just a little bit closer to being something that could eventually be turned into a pointy-clicky self-serve solution.

I’ll be real interested to see how all that comes about.  Next to that, this whole Amazon/Macmillan thing is just a side-show, an amusing light-show that is at best a mild precursor to the main event.