More Price Whinging -- Feel free not to click.

[EllenR]

Maybe, maybe not.  It won't apply to the big house publishers any time soon, and they're the ones who have the most ridiculous prices right now.  It only applies to 'self-published' authors who use the DTP platform, and most of them have lower prices already anyway.  I see where the article says that Amazon hopes to use the new structure to bring pressure on 'regular' publishers too, but I doubt that will happen any time soon...

Oh well, darn.

[Victorine]

Maybe, maybe not.  It won't apply to the big house publishers any time soon, and they're the ones who have the most ridiculous prices right now.  It only applies to 'self-published' authors who use the DTP platform, and most of them have lower prices already anyway.  I see where the article says that Amazon hopes to use the new structure to bring pressure on 'regular' publishers too, but I doubt that will happen any time soon...

It might not take as long as you think.  Any publisher who wants the 70% royalty will have to play by Amazon's rules.  Otherwise, they only get the 35%. 

Just for kicks... let's take a novel priced at $14.99.  With the 35% royalty, the big publishing house is making $5.25 on each book sold.  (Not counting anything being paid out to the author.)  If they lower their price to $9.99, and get the 70% royalty, they get $6.99 per book sold.  If they're selling 1,000 books a day, they're losing $1,740 a day.  On one book.  And that doesn't take into account how many more books they would sell at the lower price.

I can't imagine they won't start playing the game with money on the line.

Vicki

[Steph H]

It might not take as long as you think.  Any publisher who wants the 70% royalty will have to play by Amazon's rules.  Otherwise, they only get the 35%. 

The 70% royalty only applies to authors who 'self-publish' using the DTP platform.  The 'Big 6' (as I think I've heard them referred to -- Macmillian, Penguin, etc.) publishing houses don't use DTP, and thus are subject to completely different payment/royalty rates than the 70%/35% rule.  All but one, as I recall Random House being the only hold-out, have the agency model agreement they forced Amazon into now, that basically lets the publisher choose whatever the heck price they want and Amazon *has* to agree to it, no matter how ridiculous it is.  You can tell which ones those are, by the 'price set by the publisher' tag just underneath the price amount on those Kindle pages.