I’ll step in to what might be controversy here, but what the heck.
Typically, e-books have not been a large source of revenue for self-published authors. At Dog Ear Publishing, our self published authors have almost never seen sales from an e-book amount to even 1% of their print product.
So, it was with interest that I read the release from Barnes & Noble about their acquisition of Fictionwise.com and eReader.com, (both owned by the e-book retailer Fictionwise Inc.) for $15.7 million in cash.
The Barnes & Noble release states that it “plans to use Fictionwise as part of its overall digital strategy, which includes the launch of an e-bookstore later this year.” No word was mentioned if this is a response to the Amazon Kindle product – from what I could tell, most of the books on the Fictionwise “Bestsellers” list don’t support the Kindle MOBI format…
Could this perhaps initiate some sort of growth in the e-book market? I’m not sure – at least for conventional titles such as fiction – but it is an interesting market strategy for B&N.
A bit of a left-turn in this conversation: Take a look at the Fictionwise “Bestsellers” list- and check out the incredible disparity in price for the e-books… along with the fact that the number one bestseller isn’t from one of the traditionally large houses and they are only charging $7.00 for the e-book. A bunch of the bestsellers are only $1.00. Could these publishers be using the e-book as a book marketing tool?
Is it time to reconsider the e-book?
Filed under: book marketing, Current events, self publishing Tagged: | Barnes & Noble, book marketing, e-book, self publishing
