Konrath's Amazon Encore Deal

Thanks to Rich Kelley for flagging Mike Shatzkin's important take on the new Konrath/Amazon deal for Konrath's forthcoming novel Shaken.

Amazon will publish the Kindle edition at $2.99 in October and release a paperback at $14.95 next February ... this is a significant jolt to conventional publishing economics. Sales of Konrath’s $2.99 ebook will deliver him about $2.10 a copy (Konrath says $2.04; not sure where the other six cents is going…), as much or more as he would make on a $14.95 paperback from a trade publisher, and significantly more than he’d make on a $9.99 ebook distributed under 'Agency' terms and current major publisher royalty conventions. And, however one feels about the degree to which pricing is a barrier to ebook sales, one must assume that the $2.99 price will result in a lot more ebook sales than a $9.99 price would. Many times the sales!