Welcome to E-Book Week

By Chester Campbell

March 3-9 is E-Book Week. The e-book revolution has changed the face of the publishing world. The major publishers were dragged into it kicking and screaming, but they're now pushing ahead. There's still a lot of disagreement about prices and royalties, with some publishers charging as much for e-books as they do for print books, though they don't have the same production expense involved.

Authors who are able to negotiate contracts that leave them with their electronic rights typically cut the price for their e-books. After writers like Joe Konrath struck out big-time in the e-book business with prices like 99 cents or $2.99, showing huge sales numbers, this became something of the standard for pricing. When Amazon started paying 70 percent royalties on books at $2.99 or above, that became the benchmark.

The ebookweek.com website is full of information on the electronic publishing business. There's an excellent history of e-books at the website here.

I suspect most of the books written by the authors who appear in this blog are available as e-books as well as books in print. Some, like my The Poksu Conspiracy, can only be purchased in the .mobi format for the Kindle. But it isn't necessary to own a Kindle to read it. Amazon has programs to download allowing you to read their e-books on your PC, laptop, cell phone, and wherever. And if you own a Nook or other e-reader that uses files such as EPUB, you can get a free program at calibre-ebook.com that will let you convert files from one e-book format to another.

For the author who owns their rights, e-book royalties at 70 percent can be as much or more than paper royalties even with a low price. Personally I'm doing better than ever since most of my sales are e-books. If you haven't read an e-book lately, celebrate E-Book Week by ordering one now.

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