Lost Book Sales

Picture this
You've just bought your shiny new Sony Reader or unpacked your Amazon Kindle and logged on to try and purchase books in your favourite genre.

Or.

You've been eagerly awaiting the latest in your favoured author's series but its retailing at the same price as the hardback.  What can you do? Rant on your blog, march (figuratively) to the author's email contact page, or the publishers website and give them a 'considered' piece of your mind?

Victim of their own success
The growth of eBooks seems to have come by surprise.  Geo restricted titles of your favourite authors seem to be the result of wheels turning slowly in the publishing world rather than any nefarious intent on behalf of the 'industry'.

And price well that's still a contentious issue.  Some authors can get away with outsourcing, editing, artwork and marketing themselves selling e-books at $2.99, while Publishers claim that eBooks just add extra work to the production workflow and hence the cost saving of doing away with paper is negligible.

Pricing and availability will work themselves out in the long run.  Those that offer cheap quality books in multiple formats I think will win out.  It won''t be simply a case of being a good author.  You have to be able to produce quality content and make it available to the consumers who want it and be heard over the increasing din of  competent writers.

Lost Book Sales
In the mean time you can help authors and publishers see where they might be missing out on sales, or where the might have priced their product too high(according to consumer sentiment) by filing a report at Lost Book Sales

Here's their rational from their About page:

Every day an author and a publisher lose out on a sale of book.  This is a site for readers to tell the world about the lost sale whether it is because of price, territorial restrictions or general availability. There are a whole host of reasons a particular book is not distributed all over the world. Sometimes agents advise their authors to sell only domestic rights which usually means US or UK get the goods. Sometimes publishers aren’t exploiting those rights.

When an author writes a book, intellectual property rights are created that run with the book. Think of those rights as a bouquet of flowers. When authors enter into contracts with publishers, generally, they sell just a few flowers to the publishers. Those flowers give the publisher the right to use that Book in various ways but only in North America. But these contracts can vary a great deal. Foreign rights sales can end up making as much money for the author as the original advance.

What I have been told by some authors is that they don’t want to impair their marketability for those foreign markets by allowing an english language digital edition to be sold in that region. Other authors say that their foreign edition rights haven’t been purchased by any publisher and they don’t want to give them up for no additional money

[read more]

So  here you have the opportunity to vent your spleen in a constructive way.  Here's hoping that publishers and authors find it helpful.

H/T to Marg at The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader