Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
Well, it depends.
If you have agreement with Amazon, that gives you 70% of the price, the agreement has a catch or two.
Like, you get 70% of sale price and not list price.
Another nice catch is, that when somebody discounts your book, Amazon matches the price.
So.
You publish your book on Amazon. List price $1.99.
For each book sold you get 0.7x$1.99. Nice and dandy.
You also publish on Smashwords, with the same price $1.99
Then comes third party, that gets the books from Smashwords and discounts your book to $0.0
Amazon matches the price, and your "sales" skyrocket. Except now you make 0.7x$0.00 on each sale.
You - the author - rush to Amazon and try to change the contract to 35% of the List price. No problem here, 0.35x$1.99 is significantly more than 0.7x$0.0 and you make the difference up on volume. BUT! (You knew there would be a but, didn't you?) But, the process takes 2 days or more.
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Yes. I thought it was great when retailers discounted my books but was always worried about the scenario above (though I'd rather have readers than money). Now I can set one price and forget it. I had my novel Tesla's Stepdaughters set at $2.99, then Amazon discounted it to $2.59. Now that there is a single price and it's not going to change, I've lowered it to $1.99. It's already changed at Amazon and Smashwords, though it may be a few weeks before the new lower price shows up at the Smashwords affiliates.