Thanks, Richard. I hope your move works well. Yup, 'absolutely love' is a bit wild. I do think it would be good thought to allow folks to kind of 'vote with their wallets'.
All our other retailers would charge whatever they see fit, of course, but the income on ebooks bought through out own wee site would be a bit like a free market survey for us ... we'd be able to see from payment on sales what folks really think is good value for the money and precious reading time they've spent.
We can't expect a written review from every reader, so this might be a way of testing the water.
It's just a thought right now, but I know from my experience in restaurants and bars (maybe too much of it) that -- forget the bill -- the measure of my appreciation is shown in the size of my tip: the voluntary payment in return for satisfaction.
On your last point, our main sales are in paperback and the huge majority of out ebooks move through other, bigger, high profile retailers, so the impact on author royalty would be insignificant, using our own site's offers. For the past eight years, for instance, we've pegged ebooks at our site at the equivalent of a single GP£ because we saw them as largely promotional. Income to authors has come from paperback and ebook sales through the big players that account for about 95% of our total sales.
I mean ... who the heck has ever heard of
www.bewrite.net? Hoots. Neil