[ojiikun]

All I took away from this was that AAPL wanted to make about $0, AMZN wanted to make about -$3, and in both cases the author makes about $3, meaning that of the $13 wholesale, the publisher is getting a 75% cut of the sale.

I cannot fathom that the publisher performs any function possibly worth this much money. How, since we no longer have to ship dead trees, have we not evolved a system that gives authors 75% of the sale price?

[adrianhoward]

I cannot fathom that the publisher performs any function possibly worth this much money. How, since we no longer have to ship dead trees, have we not evolved a system that gives authors 75% of the sale price?

Because the dead trees are only about 10% of the cost of publishing a book (and since the tax laws for ebooks are different in many countries that saving is often immediately eaten up by higher taxes).

Because many (most?) authors want to spend their time writing - not publishing. Because producing a book takes time and money. Because publishers also essentially act as the VCs of the book market. Most authors don't earn out their advances.

Take a look at the breakdown of the cost of a bestseller http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-cost... for some vague evidence on how much money publishers actually make out of a book.

(The slice taken by marketing in the above seems high from what others have told me. Its also a somewhat simplistic breakdown since it ignores some of the long-term costs from publishers that aren't related to "books" directly. e.g. the advances to authors who never get published, etc. - so the potential publisher profits aren't quite as large as they appear here - there's other overhead outside the printing/distributing/selling books bit)

Also see http://ireaderreview.com/2009/05/03/book-cost-analysis-cost-...

It's also something Charlie Stross has posted about a fair bit see this collection of posts http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...

TL;DR - people think about book prices being related to cost of producing media. That's like thinking software costs are mostly about the price of printing DVDs or shifting bits. It's mostly about book development costs - not media costs.

[Guvante]

Apple has always made 30%. They were the ones to start that model.

Publishers are actually about relationships, not dead trees. They can get your book to the customer, which is where the value is. From the consumer point, you only care about the producer, but the producer cares about the publisher a lot more than the customer.

[jbooth]

Yeah, but again, that's back when you'd be talking with all these different retail stores to get your book to the customer. Plus printing, shipping, all that.

How about 1) Write book. 2) Spend a day or two getting it on Amazon, Apple, B&N online. 3) Keep 100%.

Might be harder for authors who need marketing but I have no idea why established authors aren't self-publishing en masse.

[elithrar]

> How about 1) Write book. 2) Spend a day or two getting it on Amazon, Apple, B&N online. 3) Keep 100%. Might be harder for authors who need marketing but I have no idea why established authors aren't self-publishing en masse.

The issue there is that if no one knows about you or your book, 100% of nothing is still nothing. Publishers also often provide advances, which can be make a big difference.

Note that I am not defending some of their questionable business practices, but to pretend they provide zero value is silly.

[sireat]

There have been numerous posts by authors (some here on HN) that publishers offer very little marketing these days.

You have to do the marketing legwork yourself, even if you are with a major publisher.

The advances might be the one thing they offer, but then Kickstarter might be an option.

[hkmurakami]

AAPL makes $3~4.

Publishers are who "make" the writers in the first place (unfortunately) by shouldering the distribution, marketing, etc. Without them (or without the author being e-famous(tm) already), an author can't hope to sustain himself through writing.

Maybe things would change if we were more willing to "pay" for discovering content creators through our own time investment, but this is doubtful.

[robotresearcher]

eBook distribution is now handled by Amazon, BN and Apple. No reason to pay the old publishers for that.

[objclxt]

Amazon, BN, and Apple don't pay advances (...to the vast majority of authors. Maybe a few exceptions for big name exclusives).

Many authors write books, send them to their agent to sell, and then get paid up-front by a publisher, followed by an agreed royalty should the book sell more than a certain amount. This offers a certain amount of security, more so than self-publishing.

The more important point is that for many authors, the international markets are a big source of revenue. Self publishing in English is one thing - sorting out the translation is quite another.

I think it's important to not tar all publishers with the same brush. There are actually a growing number of independent publishers dedicated to the indie/digital space.

[valleyer]

Old habits (and legacy establishments) die hard.

[6d0debc071]

Well, publishers still do something - marketing and relationships mostly, I believe - but realistically they don't do anything worthy of that sort of money. It's just difficult to do things without them. I vaguely remember a story about a woman a while back who had just hired a publisher to do marketing for her though, rather than acting as a publisher and taking massive loads of money from it. So, it definitely sounds possible to get around them.

Sort of like the music market, from the sound of it - massive rip-off. But if they're the people who control the majority of the publicity....

[TylerE]

They also, in most cases, front an advance (with no guarantee of getting it back), which allowed the author to work on the book without starving.

[6d0debc071]

There's plenty of excellent, freely available, writting out there that didn't involve an advance. So, I'm sceptical of the necessity of that model.

But even if we assume that an advance was necessary - A couple of years of no starvation wages ought to be negligible compared to the sort of amounts we're talking about for a successful book. You don't pay fixed amounts back in terms of percentage of take - that's foolish. At worst you might pay it back with a risk premium, like a bond.

Publishers would presumably have you believe that they're providing a service, at risk to themselves, and that risk is sufficient to justify their take. That they have to make as much money as they can on the few successful books to pay for the masses of dross that they fund. But this just makes it an exceptionally bad deal for people who are consistently good. If you have a track record, then you should be in a different risk pool.

The questions are really ones of risk management and information asymmetry: how many successful books are you going to get and how well can you predict your risk? Does the author even need an advance? Are the editors even honestly trying to predict the success of a book or are they just going with their gut or their political bias or whatever? It's not a very competitive market after all.

If people had the option to not take an advance, and to take a much larger cut of the sales, I think many would.