Behind The Barred Window: enama discipline

Saturday 1 May 2010

Enforced Weight-Gain / Enforced Price-Hike: Avarice in Publishing and Other Chubby Subjects

Dieting and exercise had been her life - but her stepmother never approved of a career in fashion cat-walk modeling in any case!

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A straight-jacket and a box of chocs! An intriguing little pic I stumbled upon recently that reminded me of a certain section of the new volume that I have part-written - albeit in a fragmented form – and that I have neglected of late. Note to self: Get it finished!!!

The point is; the whole thing - the above text and pic – makes for a nice, if a little diffuse, allegory for the behavior of Lulu (the self-publishing bunch through whom my books are currently distributed). For a long while Lulu charged a flat per download for electronic PDF versions of books. The difference between that fee and the price charged to readers – which the author gets to choose – is the amount the writer receives as a royalty or payment. Fine! It was fine as far as I was concerned even when they upped that fee by around ninety – odd percent a while back. All seemed to have been stable in terms of charges for quite some time; i was happy with my share and did not want to charge my readers any more than absolutely necessary to make it worth my while (which strictly speaking, from a purely economic standpoint it isn't) – which is why I always encourage folk to purchase electronic downloads. As you may or may not know, I have been tweaking volume 2 for some time in preparation for assigning it an ISBN so as to distribute it via Amazon, Waterstones and the like and also to make it available to the Google Book-Search engine. To these ends, to make it more visible to the various search engines (volume 1 is near-on invisible to Amazon's search engine, which by default searches book titles for entered key-words) I have gone in for a little bit of 'search engine optimization' by way of including a rich mix of key words in sentence form (so Google doesn't recognize it as what it is – a list of key words) at the top of each chapter heading page. Having completed that task I had then to replace the existing file on Lulu's site – and all went well on that front. But lo and behold! It now turns out the whole pricing structure has changed (if I had known beforehand I wouldn't have bothered). Not content with collecting their flat fee (which is still levied), the folk at Lulu now want to take a proportion of the 'profit' on top of that fee (a proportion, mind you i.e a percentage!). The long-shot of all this is; in order to receive the same amount per download as before (not a fortune - and neither is there the volume of sales through that channel to offset that fact) I have been forced to increase the price. Not merely by the shortfall though – because Lulu takes a percentage of the profit, their chunk goes up along with any increase one instigates. The long and short of this latter point is that the price-hike is substantial – I now have to price INSTITUTIONALISED volume 2 at £4.95 per download or £9.95 per print copy. This goes against all my principles and further more compromises the original intentions I had when I set out writing (largely for my own amusement but also to fill a hole in the genre). INSTITUTIONALISED volume 1 remains the same price (and hopefully always will) and in addition I hope to have some exciting news regarding volume 1 next time (I'd hoped to have space to tell you this time, but I got side-tracked).