Ellora's Cave: New Kindle Contract and Forthcoming Website

Two things: Ellora’s Cave has a new contract with Amazon for Kindle sales. Also, Ellora’s Cave’s website is currently down, but apparently a new site’s forthcoming. Emails from EC follow, along with minimal commentary from me.
Yesterday, EC’s site was completely offline. Today, they’ve got a placeholder page up, which is an improvement.

Ellora’s Cave Has a New Amazon Kindle Contract

(edited slightly only for formatting reasons)
Sent: Monday, June 29, 2015 2:25 PM
Subject: [ec_biz] New EC Kindle contract
Dear authors,
You hear about it when huge publishers like Simon & Schuster or Penguin Random House are renegotiating their expired Amazon contracts. But that happens to the rest of us too, although it doesn’t make the news. EC’s Kindle contract recently expired, and we had notified Amazon we did not want to renew at the old terms, wanted to negotiate a better deal for EC and our authors.
EC now has a new contract for ebook sales with Kindle, one that we feel will bring more royalty income! [The negotiations are why I have so many more silver hairs and have been mainlining chocolate for weeks. 😉 ] Amazon has a very stringent confidentiality clause, so we cannot disclose the exact details of the terms. This new contract will go into effect early July.
Royalties will be based on both list price of the ebook and the location of the purchaser. Royalty rates will be significantly higher for sales within the US and in our other primary customer bases, and when ebook list price is $2.99 and higher. Almost 90% of EC Kindle sales meet these criteria! For ebooks priced less than $2.99 or sold in other areas of the world, per-unit royalties will be reduced by about 25%–but those are only about 10% of our Kindle royalty income, so this was an acceptable negotiation trade-off.
In light of the above royalty rate changes, EC has reevaluated our ebook pricing structure and is making adjustments to take best advantage of the algorithms.

• Ebooks with a current list price of $2.00 to $2.98 will be repriced to $2.99, so that they get the improved royalty rate. Almost all these books are the older backlist titles whose prices were halved; even with the very slight upward adjustment, they will still cost significantly less than their original list price.
• We will no longer release new books priced less than $2.99. We are making appropriate adjustments in minimum word count and multi-short-story packaging.
• We have calculated that with the new royalty rates, EC can lower list prices a bit and still bring in more income. Lower prices will hopefully encourage more sales, especially since we are strategically dropping each price point into the next lower dollar bracket. For example, ebooks with a current list price of $5.60 will become $4.99, those at $6.50 will become $5.99, and so on. These changes will occur in early July, and apply across the board—all etailers.

The new contract does eliminate EC’s previous exemption to have a cover price on its own webstore that was lower than what we provide to vendors. So the EC webstore is being revamped, will show just the standard new List Price.
The royalty and pricing changes will show up starting with your July royalties statement.
(end email)
Assuming there’s no spin on this, this sounds like a very good deal for Ellora’s Cave and its authors.

New Ellora’s Cave Website Forthcoming

Sent: Wednesday, July 1, 2015 9:35 AM
Subject: [EC newsletter] New EC webstore
From Darrell King, Chief Creative Officer, Ellora’s Cave Publishing Inc.:
Ellora’s Cave is in the process of switching to a new and improved website. It’s streamlined, cleaner, easier to use and tablet/smartphone friendly!
As par for the course, we expect some minor bumps in the road during the changeover. Unfortunately, the restructuring of the store means that the old bookshelf system will not transfer to the new site, but our customer service staff will be standing by to assist you along the way as we transition.
We appreciate your patience as we work to improve your experience with Ellora’s Cave. In order to avoid overloading customer service with web-related issues during the next few days, please send your questions or comments about the website to website@ellorascave.com. We will answer all queries as quickly as possible. Thanks for your understanding and we hope you enjoy our wonderful new online shopping experience!
Darrell King
Chief Creative Officer
Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.
Deirdre’s comment: I hope it’s less red.
Update: the new website is up, at least in its early form, and there is no red to be seen.

• ellorascave

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