Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
A sweet spot is merely the point of maximum result.
A baseline to *start* calculating the price the market will bear.
It says nothing about degradation as you move up from it or diminishing returns as you go lower. How those manifest will vary by product and creator.
Stephen King might sell ten million at $6.99 and $9.5 million at $10 because he has a strong brand and his market has good price elasticity. Going high makes sense for him.
Joe newcomer might sell 100,000 at $4.99 and only 10,000 at $10, which would kill his tradpub career.
Uniform pricing (whether high or low) favors big established players at the expense of smaller, newer players trying to ramp up their careers. The actual price isn't as important as the need for a spread between the idol of millions and the opening act nobody heard of.
In many industries the concept of "Introductory price" is common, going low to build people's familiarity with the product or the brand, with a hint that waiting for the product to be a known quantity will cost more in the end. That is how Amazon established Echo and FireTV, by seeding the market with low-priced units and then reverting to the normal price. Early adopters helped establish the brand and got a bargain. Those that waited paid full freight.
Publishing does it backwards, charging the highest prices early with the understanding that price will come down later.
That works for Steven King (though not as well as it used to) but not for Trixie Debutante's first book. King is a gotta-have-now for his legion of fans but Trixie has no pre-existing fans so the reaction to her $12 ebook is going to be "wait for the library, wait for a sale, wait, wait, wait..." Once the three month launch window is over, Trixie might just be done. Then the book gets remaindered and the waiting ends.
Even "industry experts" are now discussing the reality that uniform pricing is killing debut tradpub authors.
http://www.idealog.com/blog/ebook-pr...nsional-chess/
Quirky indie movies get priced lower than the latest Marvel billion buck movie because the Marvel movie will move at $25 and the indie movie will die at anything over $15. That is brand strength at work. Hollywood gets that. Publishing doesn't.
Uniform pricing is 19th century thinking.
Modern thinking is by necesity more nuanced,more dynamic. |
Interestingly, it was the platform companies that pushed uniform or near uniform pricing. The music companies and book companies very much favor variable pricing. From the platform companies, who tend to view it as generic content for the most part, having fixed prices tends to establish customer loyalty to the platform, which is what they are looking for. They do like the idea of having specials for certain content to pull in new customers, but having true variable prices tends to cause issues with those customers who expect everything to be cheap.