All well and good, but milking his fans for every penny he can get isn't the way to go.
I think you need to revisit your assumption about Jim's motivations: the money doesn't add up the way you think it does.
The Law:
26 * $300 = $7,800
2000 * $45 = $90,000
So, just shy of $100K
in toto (these are limited print-runs; there's no more blood in that turnip until
The Law gets re-released in another format).
Skin Game sold 50K copies in the first week (per a reddit thread, dunno the source of the number, but seems viable).
50,000 * $28 = $1,400,000
in one week. So more than a tenfold-larger insta-sales... with ongoing sales thereafter (not available to
The Law, as noted above) probably doubling that over the course of a few months, amd dribbling off after that.
In both cases, of course, we don't know Jim's share of the price; but since Subterranean Press' collectors'-edition is gonna include color plates,
and is a small print-run, I presume their manufacturing costs-per-book are MUCH higher than a mass-market mainstream book.
I'm pretty sure sure Jim is getting
less money this way (or at least, getting the money
slower).
###
My own WAG -- a realworld WAG vs a Dresdenverse WAG -- is that the issue isn't "revenue" but contracts & "exclusive rights..." I theorize that Jim has negotiated the end of Subterranean's "exclusive" rights to this novella, so they match closely with the end of a bunch of other anthologized shorts. So it'll all be available around the same time, for him to produce a new Dresden collection.
But the story is written & available, and big enough to be its own thing; so he releases it in a "deluxe" collectors' edition, and the well-heeled megafans can get their hardcore itch scratched, and Jim gets a bit of revenue, pending the rest of his collection exiting their excusive-first-rights periods.
