

Independent author John Locke joins Amazon's million-Kindle-seller club - teralaser
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/06/independent-author-john-locke-amazon-million-kindle-seller-cost.html

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dhyasama
Shockingly naive article. "If he sold one million books at $100 each he would
make so much more! What is he thinking?" Uh, maybe no one would buy his books
if he charged more? Perhaps he's an intelligent man and has experimented with
different prices? Perhaps the author of the article should have asked him?

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scott_s
This piece is bizarre because the author never once acknowledges that it's
possible Locke could _not_ sell a million of his books the conventional way.
In other words, the author never acknowledges that Locke may have made _less
money_ with a traditional publisher.

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StavrosK
> Locke makes less money with his 99-cent gambit than he would selling the
> same number of books with a traditional publisher.

It's like nobody has ever heard of a supply/demand curve.

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adamjernst
Well she does say "the same number of books with". It's the implicit
assumption that he'd sell the same number of books that is faulty, not the
text itself.

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StavrosK
It's the assumption I'm finding fault with, though. Why include it? It's
entirely unreasonable.

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billybob
This title made me do two double-takes.

My first thought: "Are people are buying public domain philosophy works as
Kindle books?" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke>

My second thought: "Is somebody writing as Locke as a reference to Ender's
Game?"

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kmfrk
>If he sold a million Kindle e-books at 99 cents, he'd clear $346,500 -- nice
work if you can get it. But if he were working with a traditional publisher,
that $346,500 might be a lot closer to $1 million.

If there's an "if" in every one of your hypothetical sentences, it's probably
not an argument worth pursuing.

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brendino
This article fails to bring several factors into its economic model. It should
be about incentives and demand elasticity here - the "steepness" of the demand
curve.

According to the article, he recieves $0.35 from a Kindle sale, and ~$2 from a
traditional book sale. In this case, he would need to sell (2/0.35) = 5.7
times as many Kindle books as traditional books to be neutral between the
options. To get the equivalent incentive from traditional books, he would need
to sell ~175,000 traditional books.

Since he offers both physical and Kindle editions for his books, the question
becomes, did ~175,000 customers purchase the Kindle book who normally would
have purchased the physical book? Probably not, IMO.

So basically, it sounds like Locke actually knows what he's doing - he's
driven by monetary incentives and his arrangement has more-or-less maximized
his proceeds.

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bcl
It will be interesting to see how sustainable his success is. I bought one of
his books for $0.99, well below my impulse buy threshold, and found it to be
worth about that. It wasn't a really bad book, but it wasn't much better than
what you find in a college creative writing class.

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hnsmurf
Have you read Steig Larsson or Dan Brown? Poor writing skills don't disqualify
one from selling millions of books at a much higher price point.

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hongkonger
Was the author employed by a traditional publisher to discredit the Kindle
business model?

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fleitz
No, but the PR person who sent in the article probably was.

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ShabbyDoo
So, is it known for sure that Amazon did not cut him a special deal? It might
be rational to incent a "hot" author to offer up a good deal on an exclusive
in the Kindle marketplace. Perhaps he got to keep a much higher percentage?

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UncleOxidant
Oh, I was thinking it might be the 17th Century English philosopher.

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wglb
The gatekeepers are angry, and they are experiencing major cognitive
dissonance.

