Earn A Lot With An E-Book?

I read in the news that while Amazon has been promoting so much and implements with the new Kindle (an e-book reader device) has caused problems with writers and authors about the pricing.

Which lead me to further research to how much an author should be earning out of an e-book. Further down the line, I found nothing but more disputes between recognized authors and publishers over the retail price argument. It's a shame really that authors who were paid to write were more nothing more than another product of another company. And here I thought authors can actually have the freedom to write and make a lot of money in the book industry. But I was wrong.

However, to make my point, I am going to quote a relevant part of Mokoto Rich's article at New York Times:

Now let’s look at an e-book. Under the agreements with Apple, the publishers will set the consumer price and the retailer will act as an agent, earning a 30 percent commission on each sale. So on a $12.99 e-book, the publisher takes in $9.09. Out of that gross revenue, the publisher pays about 50 cents to convert the text to a digital file, typeset it in digital form and copy-edit it. Marketing is about 78 cents.

The author’s royalty — a subject of fierce debate between literary agents and publishing executives — is calculated among some of the large trade publishers as 25 percent of the gross revenue, while others are calculating it off the consumer price. So on a $12.99 e-book, the royalty could be anywhere from $2.27 to $3.25.

All that leaves the publisher with something ranging from $4.56 to $5.54, before paying overhead costs or writing off unearned advances.

At a glance, it appears the e-book is more profitable. But publishers point out that e-books still represent a small sliver of total sales, from 3 to 5 percent. If e-book sales start to replace some hardcover sales, the publishers say, they will still have many of the fixed costs associated with print editions, like warehouse space, but they will be spread among fewer print copies.

Technically, you can still earn a lot of money as a designated author of your own e-book. You just don't need a publisher to help you sell it. Consumers have been complaining when their favorite author's new novel book came out on Amazon. Usually, a normal hardcover, paper-printed book costs around B$12.50 - B$21.00. But now with Kindle and the promotion rage of e-books entering the readers' market, the price for that author's novel has increased by double. Which made no sense when publishers who set the retail should be thinking long-term gain than immediate returns.

It is true that even if it's a different format from a physical property to an intellectual one, publishers still have to maintain its copyrights within the e-book's content. It is the same in the music, film and entertainment industry. We often see people (or ourselves) downloading them because we're cheap. Ripping off their content because that's where the value comes out of. Not the physical attributes of entertainment like books, CD and DVD.

I remember I was told about this once by an old friend. He explained to me the difference in today's commercial industry from a book he read. He read the book because it was titled, "FREE" but the back part of the book says, "How to fill that generation gap." So basically, it was a benefit that he read that book because it fulfilled what he needed to know about the modern youths and the new generation as compared with the old.

I'll talk about this in the next post. Be sure to bookmark or subscribe to my RSS Feed and read it on Google Reader! It's free! ;)



-Let the power of wealth be with you~