MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - What's the best price for an ebook? -- Survey

andrewburt · 12-16-2010, 05:20 PM

Hi all, I'm conducting a little survey that should be of interest to all us ebook authors.

It's critical for authors who sell ebooks directly to know what's the best price to put on an ebook to maximize our income. If you double the price and sell more than 1/2 as many copies, you come out ahead; if you sell less than half you might lose money. Finding out which is best is clearly in our best interest.

Thus I'm conducting a survey at

http://critique.org/edsurv

to collect data on how ebook prices relate to unit sales, called the "Elasticity of Demand." (Even if your goal is to build a reader base rather than maximize income, you'll still want to know how pricing relates to sales. Perhaps pricing something too low is actually harmful... the only way to find out is to analyze the data.) There's also the question of pricing vs. length for those who sell articles / short stories vs. books. This information doesn't seem to be available online - at least, I haven't seen it, so please point me to it if you have - thus I decided to collect it for our mutual information.

So please enter your last 6 months sales data. (Or shorter or longer if that's easier for you. The more data the better, but things have been changing so fast that data going back more than a year may not be relevant, so I want to cap it at a year, maximum.) What's important is that you report data from all your titles for the same period of time, even if they sold 0 copies.

Your data are entered anonymously and only include #copies/price/length, so there's nothing personally sensitive.

Thanks for your input!

12-16-2010, 05:20 PM	#1
andrewburt Science Fiction Writer Posts: 231 Karma: 124188 Join Date: Dec 2010 Location: Golden, CO Device: several	What's the best price for an ebook? -- Survey Hi all, I'm conducting a little survey that should be of interest to all us ebook authors. It's critical for authors who sell ebooks directly to know what's the best price to put on an ebook to maximize our income. If you double the price and sell more than 1/2 as many copies, you come out ahead; if you sell less than half you might lose money. Finding out which is best is clearly in our best interest. Thus I'm conducting a survey at http://critique.org/edsurv to collect data on how ebook prices relate to unit sales, called the "Elasticity of Demand." (Even if your goal is to build a reader base rather than maximize income, you'll still want to know how pricing relates to sales. Perhaps pricing something too low is actually harmful... the only way to find out is to analyze the data.) There's also the question of pricing vs. length for those who sell articles / short stories vs. books. This information doesn't seem to be available online - at least, I haven't seen it, so please point me to it if you have - thus I decided to collect it for our mutual information. So please enter your last 6 months sales data. (Or shorter or longer if that's easier for you. The more data the better, but things have been changing so fast that data going back more than a year may not be relevant, so I want to cap it at a year, maximum.) What's important is that you report data from all your titles for the same period of time, even if they sold 0 copies. Your data are entered anonymously and only include #copies/price/length, so there's nothing personally sensitive. Thanks for your input! Last edited by andrewburt; 12-16-2010 at 11:04 PM.