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Comment by psyklic | Hacker News Reader

I found the original article insightful, but this journalist's rebuttals also bring up interesting points.

- "Does content affect price?" It seems the journalist and PG define "price" differently -- is it the price to the consumer or to the publisher? Either way affects profit, so both seem valid to me.

Hence, I feel the journalist has a valid point. Laura Bush will command higher royalties. So, the price to the publisher is increased (via higher royalties/advances), because Laura Bush provides desirable content. The journalist also states that while the price to the consumer is not higher, the publishers' business model is to sell more copies at a lower profit margin per copy, which seems perfectly valid.

- "Better journalism is slightly cheaper." In some cases, yes. In others, no. Arguing over Time vs. The Economist seems to not answer the broader question.

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> Hence, I feel the journalist has a valid point. Laura Bush will command higher royalties. So, the price to the publisher is increased (via higher royalties/advances), because Laura Bush provides desirable content.

Is it really true that different authors can have wildly different royalty rates? I thought the range only spanned a few percentage points.

Advances don't really count, since they are paid out of future royalties.

Of course it's true that authors make wildly different royalty rates. Does anyone here really believe Stephen King makes the same royalty rates per book as someone like Uwem Akpan?

It's simple market economics. Stephen King will sell far more copies which means publishers will make far more money off his books. So he gets a significantly higher cut of the per book profit (aka royalties) because publishers will still end up making more money off his book than they will of a Uwem Akpan book.

Put it this way, if Mr. King's publisher didn't pay him a higher royalty fee don't you think another publisher would be willing to based on the large amount of money at stake? So again we're back to basic economics.

Got a source for Stephen King's royalty rates being significantly above the standard rates for other authors? Everything I've found says royalties range from 10-15% for hardcover, like http://www.writersservices.com/res/ri_adv_royalties.htm: "hardback royalties on the published price of trade books usually range from 10% to 12.5%, with 15% for more important authors"

You talk about simple market economics, but the publishing industry seems to be a cartel, and authors are on the whole largely shafted. The music industry is the same way...

Well, one could measure Newsweek (5.95) versus New Yorker (4.99), and I think that if you ignore tabloids and very glossy magazines most news have the same price.

And it does not really matter anyway. You pay for most newspaper and magazines by looking at the advertisements, the kiosk price is just a way to keep up the quality of the audience (and the appearance of quality of the paper) so that advertisers will pay more.

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