Quote:
Originally Posted by Lazybones
I bet if the e-book was $1 they'd sell 50x as many copies, and everyone in the chain would make more money.
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Out of curiosity, what pricing thread is that?
Our experiences (as a publisher) regarding "price elasticity of demand" have been that there's not as much demand change as people think, even between $.99 and $9.99. Which is to say, if people want a book, they seem to generally pay the asking price; and if they don't especially want the book, even a $.99 price doesn't do that much to entice them.
(Bear in mind too, as you may know, that under $2.99 on Amazon a KDP publisher gets half the income, 35% of the price instead of 70%, so you need to sell twice the delta just to break even. An author/publisher nets $7 on a $9.99 title, but only $.35 on a $.99 title, so you need to sell 20x as many just to break even, and more than 20x for it to be beneficial.)
In our pricing experiments, we haven't seen that high a level of increased buying. For some titles the number of sales remains the same regardless of price(!), and for some the increased number of sales at lower prices still nets less total income. Hmm.
As a publisher I'd love it if lowering the price earned more income for the author and us, but sadly that hasn't been our experience.
(As for F.451, I'm glad to see it coming out, even though I'm sad it wasn't us doing it!
We bid on the rights for Bradbury's backlist, offering what I believe is the highest ebook royalty rate of any publisher, but we don't do print, and S&S apparently did a deal for both. Regardless, my dream is for all books ever published to be available as ebooks, so it's cool to see these come online. What a cool time to be living in.)