Check your Baen prices!

[Vertigo]

I just had a brief email conversation with Baen (following comments in another thread). I lookied at the pricing of the eBook A Rising Thunder and thought the prices looked wrong and sent this email:

Could you tell me why the ebook price for A rising Thunder is currently set $2 more expensive than the paperback edition? This seems like a very strange pricing arrangement.

Reply came back:

We sell our Ebooks and print books for the same prices on all outlets. However, other sellers run promotions at their expense from time to time, and those promotions may involve lowering prices on Baen Ebooks or print books.

This is the case with A Rising Thunder. As an Ebook, the set digital list price is $8.99 and the set paperback price is $15. However, other seller can choose to lower the Ebook price or the print book price at their own expense. For example, Amazon sells the Ebook version for $7.99 and the paperback for $10.99.

To which I responded:

Ummm, no actually, on this page:

http://www.baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=dweber

The Trade edition is $15
The Paperback (release Jan 14) is $7.99 (not $15)
The eBook is $9.99 (not $8.99)

And that is your page, not another seller.

Final response from Baen:

Ah, thanks for pointing that out. That information is incorrect, I'll make sure it's fixed promptly.


I apologize for all the confusion.

I have seen strange anomalies like this with the Baen pricing a few times. I guess the moral is, if buying from Baen check the prices are sensible. Also interesting that Baen are not necessarily the cheapest place to buy Baen eBooks. Although they used to be.

I'm now trying to decide whether I can be bothered checking out which price I paid for A rising Thunder.

 

[Timba]

Good tip! The painful irony is that I bought A Rising Thunder back in 02/2012 and paid $6.00. Today it is $8.99 which is still more than the paperback you list above.

A few days ago I spent $9.99 for Treecat Wars and I enjoyed the book a lot but there were 5-10 totally silly errors in spelling, words missing or the wrong version of a word (to, too, two) in a book under 300 pages. Makes you wonder who the hell is doing the editing and proof reading, the books now cost me 60% more and I swear the proofing is getting worse.

 

[jastius]

they have it now as the hardcover is twenty six and the trade is fifteen and the paperback is still seven ninety-nine. what would be the trade as opposed to the paperback? a big paperback perhaps?




ISBN:978-1-4516-3806-6, $26.00
Hardcover (March 2012)



ISBN:978-1-4516-3871-4, $15.00
Trade (February 2013)




ISBN:978-1-4767-3612-9, $7.99
Paperback (January 2014)




DOI:9781451638066, $9.99
eBook (March 2012)

 

[Vertigo]

"Trade paperback is a publishing term that refers to any book with a flexible cardstock cover which is larger than the standard mass market paperback format" from Wiki.

And yes those are still the incorrect prices that I was looking at tnd they said will be corrected.

Oh and Timba, I had an ebook the other day (can't rememer which it was) but it had almost (but not every) occurence of 'too' 'printed' as 'to.' I'm not talking about one or two either, it was a 'fat' ebook with a thousand odd pages and I actually did a search to see if they had used 'too' anywhere and sure enough they had so not a simple case of a stupid search and replace. Drives me up the wall that sort of stuff. I find every error like that yanks me out of the story.

 

[jastius]

perhaps the price increase is to make up for the free e book give away they are offering?

Baen Ebooks - Free Library

or the bundle deals?

Baen Ebooks Monthly Bundles

funny thing is, if you pre-buy the january 2014 bundle, rising thunder is a part of the package, along with six other books for eighteen dollars.

 

[Vertigo]

I got a final nice email from the lady at Baen:

When the book is released in January as a mass-market paperback, its print price will drop to $7.99 and the Ebook price will fall to $6.99.

So I guess this does still fall in line with what I would expect. Still not the nice $6 eBook but at least its price drops below that of the paperback once it is released. This is normal practice with publishers these days; eBook comes out high priced until paperback is released and then falls. To be fair they do still need to protect their hardback sales as they have always done. At least they don't hold off releasing the eBook until they release the paperback.

 

[Timba]

I got a final nice email from the lady at Baen:



So I guess this does still fall in line with what I would expect. Still not the nice $6 eBook but at least its price drops below that of the paperback once it is released. This is normal practice with publishers these days; eBook comes out high priced until paperback is released and then falls. To be fair they do still need to protect their hardback sales as they have always done. At least they don't hold off releasing the eBook until they release the paperback.

I think this is all driven by their deal with Amazon. Before that deal we got the $6.00 price and it was that price when only the hardback was out. I always thought the difference between that and the price the hardback was sold at was a reflection of the difference in their cost of producing the books. Obviously paper costs more and so should be more but I must admit that $9.99 and up for e-books strikes me as gouging.

 

[Vertigo]

They say the book publishing costs are in the preparation not the production but I confess I'm still sceptical. It's sad about the pricing isn't it? I wouldn't mind betting that the deal with Amazon doesn't let them undercut Amazon. That would be the normal Amazon approach.

 

[Parson]

They say the book publishing costs are in the preparation not the production but I confess I'm still sceptical. It's sad about the pricing isn't it? I wouldn't mind betting that the deal with Amazon doesn't let them undercut Amazon. That would be the normal Amazon approach.

Unfortunately, I'd also bet that they sell more ebooks now that they allow Amazon to sell them. Before the ebooks were only avail at Baen, and I'd be shocked if even half the potential readers went over there to buy them. I didn't even know about the place until Timba pointed it out a year or two ago. (Reminds self to be careful about which "to" to use.)

 

[Vertigo]

You been reading my typos rant, Parson? I don't get too worried on posts - I probably mistype it myself here often enough - but in books they really ought to be expected to get that sort of thing right!

And yes I'm certain they do. I don't envy them (or any of the smaller publishers) their position; I'm sure they must hate dealing with Amazon, but the way things have gone you really do have to deal with them if you're a publisher, especially for selling eBooks.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

If you want to really support your author, ebooks are the way to go. The author gets a markedly higher percentage off an ebook purchase.

Which I am fine with... sad but true less and less I am buying a physical book. Only for certain authors do I now pick up the hardcover.

Ah, but without physical copies in shops an author's profile struggles to grow. Shared models seem more likely to be the way forward.

 

[tinkerdan]

Sad to say I think you will find this pricing disparity to be rife in the traditional publishing model and part of it may be that they are still working within an antiquated system and or they just are bull headed about their entire approach. Amazon might have some small effect but not likely as much as one might suspect.

With the POD model the paper editions are more expensive but the model calls for one interior design pass that is used on all editions. This means that by the time you get to E-books you have the design and there is very little production cost because the process already takes into consideration the possible error factors that might creep in from electronic file to conversion to kindle format. That means even if the hard editions are 29.00 for hardcover and 15.00 for paperback the e-book can be anywhere from 3.99 to 5.99 with no loss.

But most POD use electronic files all the way through the process and I'm not sure whether that holds true with all the traditional publishers.

Another factor may be the simple notion that if the under-price the e-book you run the risk of forcing many more customers to go in that direction and if you have invested the usual investment in the paper copies then you lose. Which again is not a problem with POD because you don't have that investment.