Quote:
Originally Posted by meromana
Try not to be too hard on the authors when books are priced differently at different retailers; we don't always have control over the price. In fact, most of us lose sleep at night over the fact that some of our readers are forced (by their choice of ereader) to pay more than we want them to!
--Maria
|
For a trad book, yes, the publisher sets the price and the author has no control over that.
However, self-published authors have complete control over the price set for the book. What you can't control is when a retailer discounts a price and that in turn can affect your Amazon price, which is why many authors raise their price on Smashwords. They are basing their price on the royalty, not the product, and expecting the non-kindle buyer to subsidize their royalty payments. I understand, for the most part, the Amazon price parity issue. However, it is the author's
choice to base their price on the royalty rather than the product. (And in some cases the price difference is ridiculous and verges on gouging.) It is also my choice not to buy these books.
Therefore, IMO, we are not forced by our choice of ereader to pay more, we are forced by the author to pay more. If there is some other reason for the price differences I would be interested in hearing and learning more, but as far as I can tell it is completely due to manipulating the Amazon royalty and maybe also manipulating the SW royalties as well since it changes if a book is purchased through an affiliate rather than directly from SW.
I understand that Amazon is the self-pubbers bread and butter but just raising the price on SW with a "let them eat cake" attitude is not the best solution. And easy solution, yes... but a good solution, no.
I noticed that you charge more for your SW book but also offer a coupon code to equalize the price with Amazon, and I think that is great and at least some effort to work around the Amazon price parity issue. Unfortunately, most authors don't do this. Also, your coupon code is on your website. You don't list it on SW so unless someone goes to your site, they won't know about it. (Btw, the smashwords link on your site needs to be fixed, it just takes the user to a page on your own website). Why not just put it directly in the book description or at the very least on the your bio page? Sending someone off smashwords to get the code is not a good idea.