Quote:
Originally Posted by MartinC
I'm not keen on the 99 pence thing - in the long term I don't think it's a good idea to encourage the assumption that ebooks are necessarily cheap books. If you add to that the fact that a lot of the 99 pence editions are... well... not produced to professional standards... You can see where that leads.
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There's a shift in perspectives between physical & digital sales.
For physical, the key issue is, "how much per-unit can we get, in order to offset the marginal costs?" If you had the ability, you'd sell one copy per year for $50,000; that makes the best economic sense.
With digital, there's no marginal costs. (Well. Tiny. Cost of registering each transaction, I suppose, which are absorbed into the seller's percentage.) The key pricing question becomes, "how low can I price this and sell enough volume to reach the income level I want?" It's better to sell 50,000 copies at $1 each, than 10,000 copies at $5 each--the former means you've got more potential fans for the next book. There's no disadvantage to selling more copies, the way there is with print. (With print: more copies = more chances for mistakes, more external costs, more storage issues, and so on.)
I don't know if the $1 ebook is "the perfect way to go," but there's a lot to be said for the $1 enticement and a string of $3-5 other books.