|
I have primarily republished existing books but I am just starting to get some of my own fiction out there as well. My lowest eBook price is $2.99 (my print equivalent is $8.95). Most of my eBooks are $4.99. I do have two eBooks that have higher prices due to their intended audiences. One is a teachers' guide to bully prevention for $9.99 (print is $19.99) and the other is a book that includes the full book text, the full screenplay text, and links back and forth all the common dialogue for $6.99 (print is $14.95).
My opinion is that $.99 is communicating one of two things to readers:
1. You are an established author that has already made a fortune and are giving something to your fans in appreciation.
2. You are a new or desperate writer in need of reviews and a better sales rank.
I personally find the concept of a $.99 book absurd. That would be akin to a whole $9.95 music CD selling for $.99 just because it's in digital format. What that indirectly says to me, and incorrectly communicates to the consumers, is that 90% of the cost of any creative work is due to the medium that work is delivered in.
This sets a bad precedent and has the potential of propagating in the minds of consumers, ultimately resulting in a general belief that digital content has little to no value simply because it is not tied to a physical medium.
$.99 books are also just another example of writers, primarily independent ones, getting screwed. It's like Amazon's handy "delivery cost" for eBooks. Penguin gets away with charging $14.99 for crap books from their dusty catalog that they OCR'ed and didn't even pay an intern to spell check. Is Penguin paying Amazon's "delivery cost?" I don't think so.
Amazon wants quality material and yet their $.99 / "free" book mindset, and a delivery cost tied to something as arbitrary as file size, is directly counterproductive. They want to show off the high-resolution color on the Kindle Fire but then force independent publishers to decrease the quality of their content, and increase the price of their books, to avoid losing 50% of their royalty to a stupid fee?
And to add insult to injury, Amazon's conversion tools double the file size of image-heavy eBooks, meaning that I have to pay double the "delivery cost" for the privilege of selling on Amazon. And due to their convenient "don't sell cheaper elsewhere" mumbo jumbo, I can't decrease the price of my book when selling through channels that don't charge an obscene fee or use a stupid, bloated file format. This means that every non-Amazon customer has to eat Amazon's unnecessarily inflated price as well.
Anyway, that's strayed off topic a bit. God it must be nice to have a monopoly and be able to blatantly abuse and take advantage of content creators and customers.
To sum up:
1. What most writers create is inherently worth more than $.99.
2. The priorities are reversed in that new writers who have made no money charge $.99 whereas big publishers digitize previously-published books, that have already made loads of money, and gouge consumers for them--sometimes charging more for the eBook than a brand new paperback.
Blegh. I'm sick of watching uncreative corporate fat-cats milking everyone just because they can. I hope the resounding finger the independent software/game creators are flipping at companies like Microsoft and EA bleeds over to the poor abused writers of the world as well.
|