First Billion Dollar eBook
Posted on October 25, 2010
Today’s interview is with Randy Ingermanson who is a “deranged physicist and award winning author”. He also maintains a blog and monthly e-zine about advanced fiction writing. His Ph.D. is from Berkeley where Robert Oppenheimer led development of the atomic bomb and taught a generation or so before Randy arrived. As a high school graduate Randy was named a Presidential Scholar along with others who were among the top 500 in either the SAT or ACT tests.
His stories are at the “intersection of Science Avenue and Faith Boulevard”. Representative novels include Double Vision, Transgression, Premonition, Retribution, and The Fifth Man. Two books won Christy Awards for Futuristic Fiction.
Download audio interview here (25 minutes).
Recently, Randy pondered “what it would take” for an author to make a billion dollars from a book. He concluded if such a goal were possible, it would likely be an e-book for two reasons. First, author royalties on e-books are about ten times greater than for traditional books. Second, authors can better market e-book titles than conventional ones. Read more…
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Selling e-Books as Agent
Posted on February 17, 2010
Phil Leigh
Amazon’s grudging agreement to act as agent when selling Macmillan e-books next month has important implications.
An agent is a business partner. However, Macmillan’s partnership notion is not fifty-fifty. The publisher concludes that they contribute more than twice the value of Amazon by taking 70% of the sales price for themselves and leaving only 30% for the online merchant.
There could hardly be a better example of irony considering that the 167-year-old publisher never found enough time to develop an e-book business on its own. Instead, 14-year-old Amazon.com invented the Kindle. To date Amazon has done more than any single business to launch the entire e-book industry, yet it gets the short end of the stick. Read more…
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