Yes. Books shouldn’t be priced in such a way to make people choose between books and video games, because that’s a fight we won’t win, especially if you’re a genre writer whose audience crosses over with that demographic.

EDF Comrade Kevin Shamel recently had a big push for his book and got it up to a sales rank of 4200 (on Amazon, up from probably closer to half a million) in pretty short order, and that was with less than 200 sales. There’s some sort of lesson there, I’m sure.

Also, screw Garrison Keillor to hell. He sounds scared, but hiding it behind faux-mournfulness for a dead, yet (he thinks) far superior era. It IS scary to think of everyone chattering away at their keyboards at once, until you realize that there has ALWAYS been crap, and there have ALWAYS, at any one time, been too many books for anyone to read. Even if there are ten million new books coming out every year instead of a million, the good stuff will still rise to the top, and the talented, lucky people will still sell copies.

See, Keillor’s “Old Era” didn’t end five years ago, with the advent of POD and e-pubbing, it ended in the 80s, when people switched to video games and TV (now I sound old). Readership has been declining since, and it’s been harder and harder to break in to “real” publishing. Nor do the publishers function like they used to. As he says, he waited a month for his acceptance. I’ve been waiting SIXTEEN MONTHS to hear back. Not an acceptable way to do business.
The electronic era will still have its successes – Cory Doctorow gives his books away for free, and makes a living – but it’s a weird, new, slippery surface that is hard to grasp.

Bleh. Anyway, YOUR post, yeah, I agree completely.
I think that major publishers keep their e-books priced so stupidly high so they don’t undercut sales of ACTUAL books. Which, whatever. They could also view e-pubs as a way to publish normally difficult-to-sell books, like novellas. Or like a mid-list author’s 600,000 word magnum opus that is weird and brilliant but would only sell a few hundred as a $30 hardback.

I should clarify that Amazon’s default royalty rate is 35%. To get to 70%, under new terms, your book must 1) have every Kindle function available, like text-to-speech (which isn’t that hard) and 2) must be priced lower on the Kindle than elsewhere – the reason, of course, being to sell more Kindles. And 3) It must be between 2.99 and 9.99.