FYI for those who don't know the difference in publishing circles...

[seawasp]

Hardcover and softcover (usually Mass Market Paperback) sales, from the point of view of an author, are different for a number of reasons. The most important is how much money the writer gets from a sale of each book.

EDIT: Ebooks are a different case entirely, as they involve relatively little investment per copy and pay a pretty large percentage to the author.

It seems obvious that as HC costs more, the writer gets more -- but the difference is considerably greater than that, as royalty *RATES* are also different for each type of book. Taking some averages (not including Super Selling Authors, who get better rates), you can figure that for every HC copy of a book you buy, $3.00 of that is going to the author (taking about $30.00 as the price of the book). For every PAPERBACK you buy, about $0.50 is going to the author (assuming $8.00 as the price).

So while, yes, the hardcovers are expensive, I have to sell a **LOT** less of those to "earn out" my advance. If, for example, I got a $8k advance for GCA, to "earn out" that advance (and thus start getting more money coming in) I would need to sell about 2,700 hardcovers. To earn it out in paperback, I need to sell about 16,000 paperbacks. Back in the '70s, that would have been a very reasonable, perhaps even LOW, expectation for even a newbie SF author. These days, it's a much more challenging target.

The other number tracked by publishers is "sell-through". This is the percentage of books shipped which are actually sold. This is important because it is quite possible, if a publisher misjudges, for an author to "earn out" and even be owed quite substantial royalties on a book, while at the same time the publisher is losing money hand over fist. This happens if the publisher grossly overestimates the demand for a book (often due to the bookstores over-ordering). Imagine if they were to print, say, 100,000 copies of GCA, and 20,000 of them sold. This would not only earn me out, but would mean I have a nice $2,000 check owed me. Meanwhile, the publisher is having to EAT the cost of 80,000 copies returned.

Ideally you have high sell-through percentages, and large print runs, so that in both relative and absolute terms, you're doing well. A publisher can choose to hedge her bets somewhat by choosing a deliberately low first print run, and then calling for another run if sell-through looks very good. This costs her something in that the smaller print runs cost slightly more per book, but prevents her from risking a major loss on the excess books if the book really tanks.

_Digital Knight_ had a quite good sell-through of about 70%. John Ringo is a darling of Baen because HIS sell-through regularly tops 80% (I believe it's hit 90% or above on occasion). By the time you're at the 70% mark, you're actually losing a significant number of sales because enough of the books are sold that many locations DON'T HAVE IT and so people looking for the book can't find it. My collaborations with Eric have done well but there's no way to tell whether that was just his doing or partly mine as well.

Comments

[cordova829.livejournal.com]

You can say it's partly due to you re: Eric collabs, and nobody is going to argue.

Except maybe Eric...

[kayshapero]

What's your commission on ebooks? I usually pick up books from Baen in that format, at least at first (far easier to store around here). The price is low, but 'sell-through' would appear to be 100% or danged close, and production costs low (making the ebook, whatever paypal/Visa or whomever charges to use their services etc.)

[seawasp]

Proportionately, I get a lot more per Ebook. They count towards earning out, but they're not going to count in terms of sell-through; you show one count of sell-through -- 100% -- but the other direction is just as justifiable: sell-through of ~0%, as potentially an infinite number of copies could be sold.

[kayshapero]

True, but since you don't have to produce an infinite number of copies to pay for the 'print run', the former is much more justifiable. It's about money coming in versus money going out, after all.

[seawasp]

Well, actually, the right way to do it would be to count the number of people who clicked on a link which gave them a CHANCE to buy the E-book, and then look at the proportion of those who actually DID buy the E-book.

The numbers would be dismal, though; probably less than 1 out of 100.

[kayshapero]

Why? We don't compare everybody who LOOKS at a book in a bookstore (where they've got the chance to buy it) with the number who actually buy one. Though I can see that data being of use in deciding on cover designs and the like.

[seawasp]

Because to reach the "buy me" link in most cases for an Ebook is the closest parallel to the "ordered book to be stocked" that is the basis for the sell-through. The "stock" for an ebook is an infinitely duplicable file, so you can't count that. Just buying the book isn't a measure of "how much APPARENT demand was there versus how much REAL demand was there", which is something close to what sell-through measures.

Online stores aren't really much like live bookstores at all, and I haven't yet seen a good parallel. You don't have anything like the commonness of browsing in online stores; sometimes they'll "suggest" stuff, but is it a good suggestion? It's not the same as standing in front of a rack of hundreds of books, most of which you would never buy but that you may pick up and put back. To reach "Digital Knight" in Amazon, you had to DELIBERATELY look for it, or, by some quite unlikely sequence of events, end up locating it (maybe through another author's page).

As most people coming to an Ebook have been looking for it, or something closely associated with it, that's about as close as I'd get to a measurement of "apparent interest".

[kayshapero]

So it's a different category - a measure of interest as opposed to "money spent/money received", a ratio one really wants to be less than 1.

So the more people who click and don't buy, the less perceived interest? Hmmm.... what a marvelous opportunity to do dirt to John N.. er any author I despised... :^

Of course at the same time I'd have to be very careful only to click on books by one I liked when I was planning on buying the book immediately, not just checking to make sure it wasn't two I'd read before stuck together and sneakily being resold under a new title...

[seawasp]

Well, I'm just talking a theoretical measurement. Currently Ebooks are simply ignored on that scale. I was trying to figure out something that would parallel the *usefulness* of "sell-through".

Money Spent/Money Received for an Ebook... well, you could take say 15% of the advance and other NREs, and then add in the maintenance costs for the servers, connections, etc. averaged over the works available, then track sales.

[kayshapero]

Just out of curiosity, are you seeing anything like 15% of sales being electronic? Or is that just for purposes of discussion? In any case, it sounds like useful data.

[seawasp]

On average it's currently slightly over 10%; it was close to 15% I think on the last Boundary check.

[angoel.livejournal.com]

My book capacity is primarily limited by the space I'm willing and able to dedicate to it. As a result, paperbacks are generally preferable, and ebooks even more so.

[xander-opal.livejournal.com]

This was quite interesting. It also explains why I will see a hardcover by a couple Big Name Authors languishing on the bargain rack in a bookstore.

I wonder how ebook sales and print run sales compare-- for example, I simply could not conveniently find a copy of Hoyt's Draw One in the Dark. Took me... five minutes, I think, to create a new account at webscription.net, buy a copy of the book, and change the .rtf over to .txt for my 'book reader,' aka a Nintendo DS.

At any rate, when HC or mass-market paperbacks are hard to get, how significantly do the ebook purchase numbers change?

[seawasp]

Yes. If a BNA's book is overprinted and thus there's a lot of returns, the publisher may decide that the cost of warehousing the remaining copies isn't worth it, especially if sales remain slow, and will then cut a deal with booksellers to take the entire lot off their hands at a very low price as a "remaindered" book. Bill Gates' "The Road Ahead" was so heavily overprinted that we were getting lots of that in remainders (at increasingly heavier discounts, starting at around $7.99 and eventually reaching $1.99) for about three years.

Those, I should note, the author gets nothing for. So if you purchase a remaindered book, be aware that this has given nothing but moral support to the author. The same is true of "stripped" paperbacks -- i.e., paperbacks with the cover removed. Technically these are supposed to be immediately thrown out, but often they'll end up being sold by someone somewhere.

I don't have enough data to know how the Ebook purchases track. My income from Ebooks is about 10-15% of the total, and the sales curve still generally follows the same pattern -- very fast build and spike at the beginning and a longer tail-off afterwards.

[kayshapero]

That reminds me of something I've been wondering about - should the new books sold through Amazon's third party services be assumed to be remaindered copies?

[seawasp]

Unlikely, unless they're being sold at EXTREME discounts. Third-party sellers who sell "NEW" had to have purchased it new, or at least got it from someone who bought it new and never sold it.

In the case of Digital Knight, no, they're definitely ones I would have gotten royalties for; a print run of 10k and sell-through of 70% means that there's just not very many OUT there.

Boundary sold pretty well and I don't think many of them, if any, were remaindered.

[kayshapero]

I get the impression most of the "new" sales are from commercial operations, judging by the names - things like "A1books", "Allnewbooks" and "Pbshopus", and descriptions of the slightly shopworn variety. Anyway, I won't be too concerned, then.

Speaking of Boundary, Nicolai wants to know when the sequel is likely to come out. Any idea?

[shana.livejournal.com]

That's Threshold, and it's coming in June.

[seawasp]

See my newest post.