Why, when a tollway is finished, does it cost $2.00 to pass a particular gate for the first five years, and $1.30 five years thereafter, and $0.75 from that point forward? It’s the same over time. The road hasn’t changed. The Dallas North Tollway has been here for twenty, thirty years. It’s paid itself over and over. And yet, we still pay for it. Why didn’t we choose to keep the payback to the state over a longer period of time and keep the tolls down?

Demand. High demand for the tollway. Now, not only did we pay ourselves back in record time, but we have generated tremendous income for the tollway over the years; far surpassing the cost to maintain and repair it.

So, it’s not just about breaking even on advances and overhead as quickly as possible; it’s about generating as much revenue as possible on the popularity of an author as possible.

Same thing that a hot celeb does. Work early and often as much as you can until you drop, because when you are done, you are done. That’s the biz.

You are the talent, they are the marketing team.

Even though I am an avid electronic medium reader using both the Kindle and the Sony e-Reader, I am a proponent of the phased cost approach. Make as much money as possible up front, then settle down to a leveled revenue stream long term.

Nature of the biz. And I didn’t know Amazone was doing that. Shame on them. Shame, shame on them.

There’s no reason to think that allowing Amazon to corner the market in ebooks will be good for the consumer or authors, or anyone else.

Some people will want a particular book Right Away. So charge them more for it. What’s wrong with that?

And it’s something you can do much more easily with ebooks than you can with print. How are you going to do it with print anyway? We even have a term for this: menu/shoeleather costs.

Charli is right. If publishers let Amazon get away with this, Amazon will gain that much more power in the industry, and eventually publishers will have to eat those costs too, which will be passed on to authors… There’s no good route out of this, and letting Amazon get away with this is definitely the worst possible thing that could happen.

The change in pricing is a win for everybody, including readers who would rather pay $5.99 than $9.99, and I hope Amazon sucks it up and moves on soon. Not just because my St. Martin’s (Macmillan) titles are affected, but because this is a big industry-wide issue.