Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
After reading the article yesterday, I've been considering whether or not this experiment might work for me. I'm currently debating either: - Picking a book (or maybe even the three Kestral books) and dropping the price to .99;
- dropping my entire catalog to .99; or
- pricing my next new and re-released book(s) at .99.
I want to give it fair thought, because it's not just a matter of changing it in one place: I have to make changes in the Kindle store, the PubIt! store, Smashwords, and my own site, for each book (in each format). You don't want to do all that on pure impulse.
There's also the issue that my current prices ($2.99) aren't so high that this represents a huge drop. |
You need to think of the price as one component in an overall marketing campaign, otherwise you'll end up like the hapless Stephen T. Harper with 99c ebooks that no-one buys. Take a look at John Locke's
twitter account and take a look at the sheer volume of posts and the wide variety of tags that he uses. This is the real secret to his success - he made a simple product, dropped the price so that people would take a gamble and then marketed the hell out of it so that the word got out.
If you want to try this, then I'd recommend doing it for one book only at first, and launching it with an intensive campaign (twitter, facebook, blogs, fora, etc). Lowering the price to the 'I might not like it, but it's only a buck' level is just one component in such a campaign. The real question is whether you have the time and marketing skills to make this strategy work (many people don't, I have a couple of friends who are trying to break through as writers and shudder in horror when I talk about self-publishing and self-marketing).