It’s 4.99 here [ The Way of Kings ebook]. Yes, I know I say it a lot, but I HATE geographical restriction / pricing for ebooks :(
I do apologize for this, but I honestly don’t see a way around it. I’ll use the UK as an example, though I don’t know where exactly it is that you live.
As an American author, I have a couple of choices. I can sell the UK rights to the US publisher. There’s a big risk there that they won’t do a good job with it in the UK market—they won’t repackage to give a more appropriate cover for the market, they won’t have the teams in place to work with the local booksellers. In fact, since the UK is a smaller market, they may not pay any attention to it&mdashand might not even release the book there.
Or I can sell the book to a UK company. The UK readers get a book packaged for them, and get the attention they deserve. But when the US publisher runs a promotion, they don’t have the power to change prices outside of the US.
Ebooks have done some odd things to this. For example, in the past, if you found a specific book on sale at one bookstore you’d have no reason to assume it would be on sale at the competing bookstore.
Hopefully we’ll find better solutions eventually. I DID send an email to my overseas publishers asking them to match prices for the promo—but that’s all I can really do.
I’d be curious to know where you’re from, though. It might be a place I haven’t contacted yet.
Middle east here. I think there are… more than 8? amazon regions. Each priced differently. Do you really have 8 different publishers?
The Amazon page itself claims Tor as publisher, although that might just not update per region.
I actually have around 40 different publishers at this point, though The Way of Kings only involves fourteen or fifteen of those. Is this English language? If so, it’s probably the UK publisher, as I believe they get the right to publish in most places in English language other than North America and the Philippines. If it’s Turkish or Hebrew, those are different publishers entirely. Are you on the local Amazon page, Amazon.com, or Amazon.co.uk?
It’s English, but I buy through Amazon.com, not amazon.co.uk.
I never realized an author had to deal with so many publishers. I was thinking, 2 - 4 tops. Wow.
Now I can see why this whole international availability / pricing of ebooks is so … broken. I had no idea. Hopefully once the majority of book sales moves to ebooks, you could simply use one publisher world-wide (or, maybe, different publishers for different devices—one for kindle, another for nook etc.)
I sent an email to my assistant, asking him to figure out if this is just an oversight or if something more is happening.
As for multiple publishers, the problem we run into is translation, as I mentioned above. I don’t know if I want my US publisher in charge of deciding how a translation—and a cover—for one of my books should be pitched in Taiwan.
However, for English Language, it is a little less complicated. I basically have four publishers. Tor (US), Delacorte (Teen Books), Tachyon (Novellas), and Gollancz (UK). It comes down to the fact that I’m the owner of my work, though, not the publisher. And I’m not sure I’d want to have just one publisher. If I write a book, and one publisher will offer a better deal (because it’s more their specialty) than another, it’s often in my best interest to go with that publisher for that specific book.
I DO hope we manage to get this all working more smoothly in circumstances like this, however.
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