Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
Take $0.99 as example. Imagine that all books are now that price. Huge profit because sales of each book skyrockets? No. There is only so many books that can be read. Amazon's profit depends not on one book, but on all books. They make money on every book they sell. In the grand scheme of things they could care less who's book it is. But there is different kind of buyers that will buy for different reasons, so prices cannot be the same among all books. Do you all of a sudden have 4 times as much time to read because you used to buy at $3.99, or 5 times as much for $4.99 books - since they are now only 99 cent? For simpler math, imagine the royalties are the same percent for all prices: Amazon's profit depends on how much total revenue they generate. The profit for the individual book depends on how big a pie they get out of that total revenue. So Amazon's interests are not the same as a publishers / authors interest.
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I don't really understand that. Each book is of course competing against other books, regardless of amazon. But different books have different audiences, sell power etc. So the best price is not obvious. But of course amazon would like to price a book, so that it is most profitable. It does not do that for authors, they have to think about their prices themselves. But they give advice, where they would price a book and they create incentives to price books between 1.99 and 10.
Apart from some cases of 99 cent and 1.99 books (where it could be that amzon profits more from 99 cent books), the interests of amazon and the author align. If amazon makes more money, the author makes more money too.