Quote:
Originally Posted by kristalana
See, this is what I'm hoping. And maybe they were making more money giving away higher codes because many of us would buy all the books we were kind of interested in instead of only the ones we really want? In any case, they completely killed the fun of the contests. 
P.S. Anybody wanting to throw me your 45% or higher, I'll happily take it. No sob story here, I just want some books! |
I'm guessing they were losing money, but gaining traffic/awareness. When these contests run, I notice my sales spike, but the savings come out of their proceeds not mine. This is not true of all their promotions. Some are done in conjunction with the author/publisher and there's an agreement in place on the split, but for coupons, since there is no way to know ahead of time which books will sell, they end up paying full commissions to author/publisher so far as I know. So if the coupon is 75 percent, that can add up to a loss rather than any kind of profit. (Example: If I sell Soul of the Desert for 4.99 and someone uses a 50 percent off coupon, they net 2.50. BUT they owe me 70 percent of 4.99 (or varying percentages depending on the country where it is sold, but in general).
For the even more expensive books when coupons work, they are probably sustaining larger losses (depends on the publisher agreement and I don't claim to know all of the agreements). But I'm guessing the reason they don't allow coupons on the major publishers anymore is that the losses are simply too large to justify even though there is an increase in traffic.
Thus, I suspect we will continue to see less generous coupons as they can't operate that kind of promotion forever.
I'm still using the 40 percent off code. I haven't gotten anything larger in this contest, but I'll keep trying!