Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeB1972
Actually those occasional readers will read whatever is the popular book of the month and will neither know nor care if it's indie or tradpub. Essentially, if you can get the book in paper form into supermarkets and airports, whichever book is best (or given your examples, least worst  ) will become the rage. If you give it a bit of a marketing push or it's by an author that people have found unobjectionable before then all the better. |
And those casual readers will most likely buy print at Walmart or Costco than an ebook from Kobo. If they even know Kobo exists.
All this talk about "casual readers" will save the BPHs keeps glossing over that casual readers are pbook buyers not ebook buyers. They don't care if ebooks are cheap or expensive. And, ebooks or no ebooks, they are not buying more books now than they were ten years ago. A lot of casual reader book buying is holiday season book gifting and that habit is fading.
That is not a growth market. It hasn't been, for a decade or more.
It will not make up for losses among heavy book readers who have adopted ebooks and are not going back to print no matter what.
The behavior of the two customer types are not the same and using one to project onto the other is not safe.
Now, there *is* a third class of reader that might switch from ebook to print book but it is, revenue-wise, the smallest market of all. True fans. These are people who buy a few titles a year from the same authors, religiously, and don't buy much of anything else. They're not bandwagon readers: they don't jump on whatever trendy book might be hyped. They're not adventurous or willing to try new stuff. They just want their regular fixes of Patterson, King, Grafton, or whatever.
Those folks are price insensitive for sure.
But even within a brand name author's following, those are few compared to the total market. Again, extrapolating from true fans to regular followers is a dangerous business practice. Most buyers *are* price sensitive. The threshold varies from person to person but everybody has their threshold. For some it is $10, for others it is $5 or $15. But everybody has one.
The people desperate enough to pay $50 for the latest King can probably be counted on one hand even if those willing to pay $30 is significant. But that is just for King. The market at large is not made up of loyal fans, much less True Fans.