More on thinking like a businessperson

Once nice thing about the whole brouhaha about agency pricing is that it is drawing people's attention to the publishing industry as a business, which means that there are some good posts out now about thinking like a businessperson.

Joe Konrath has a nice one on how agency pricing hurts writers. Unlike certain writers, Konrath is very aware that the financial interests of writers and publishers (and retailers, for that matter) are not always the same. (And how awesome would it be if someone like Konrath was president of the Authors' Guild, huh?)

April Hamilton has a good one titled "If you're not ready to invest, you're not ready to publish." I'll add that you might be able to invest time instead of money, but you're going to have to invest something. That's just the nature of the beast.

Passive Guy has a good set of comments on the Bezos letter. I would scroll down to Peter Winkler's comment about how Bezos is in it for himself, and then read the replies. For the most part, they reflect a very realistic attitude toward Amazon that could be summarized as: Of course the company is in this for itself; so are we; that's capitalism. As much as the demonizing of Amazon infuriates me (and mainly it infuriates me because it's bad journalism--a respectable newspaper should at least attempt to not publish quasi-fictional tripe on any subject), it's equally important not to fall into the trap of assuming that Amazon will always take care of you. You are business partners. That is all.

Oh, and Lindsay Buroker has one on doing a paper edition of your book. I'm going to tie it back to her earlier post on revenue-per-customer: When I read Maids of Misfortune, I bought the e-book, and then I bought the paper book, because I thought my sister would like it. If a paper book hadn't been available, that would have been one less sale for M. Louisa Locke. So, while you might want to save money at the outset by not doing a paper edition, eventually I think you have to do one, because it opens up so many avenues of revenue generation.