Can’t remember the last time I downloaded a FREE book.
Are you aware that last year, Apple, Hachette, and other big publishers were found guilty by a Federal judge of collusion to set ebook prices artificially high in a price-fixing scheme?
And it was not ‘Amazon’s’ petition. It was done by a group of Amazon authors, like Hugh Howey, Russell Blake, JA Konrath, and others, who have sold MILLIONS of books on Amazon. Just as the Hachette petition was done by their authors.
I have a close friend who is a New York Times Best Selling author who sells on Amazon. He sells his ebooks for $3.99 and has sold multi-hundreds of thousands of copies, and now a Hollywood production company has shown interest in one of his books.
So much for ‘crap’.
One author does not an industry make....I do not want a monopoly controlling the publishing and sales pricing of e books, period.
For authors with conventional publishing contracts, Amazon might not be optimal, since they are splitting the Amazon royalties with their legacy publishing companies.
For a self-published author like myself, Amazon is tops, paying me 70% royalties, and I can set my price anywhere I like. My printed books retail for $20, Amazon discounts them for about $15. Originally I set my Kindle prices at $10, but that is too high for an e-book by a non-famous author. I set them to 4.99 for my first novel and 6.99 for the others, and my income increased.
I think that this is the golden age for self-published authors. I have no desire to get a dinosaur contract with a legacy publisher just for bragging rights. I like the 70% royalty better than the bragging rights of being on the shelf at the few brick and mortar bookstores remaining.