What's A Fair Price For a New Release Ebook?

[SensualPoet]

Well, fwiw, I bought this for my Kindle at $1.99. Thanks! Holiday reading!

I absolutely agree that $1.99 is too low except to kick start some sales. Another Canadian small press that offers a fair selection of mystery tales is Dundurn Press. E-book list is $8.99 I believe but the everyday selling price is $7.09. With occasional discounts, it's easy to find these at $5 and change. A number of cozy mysteries sell at Kobo for $6.29 -- that range -- call is $5.99 rather than $4.99 -- is relatively risk free for the reader but still puts real dollars in the publisher's and author's pocket.

For authors with five or more titles, sliding scales are worth examining: $5.99 for the older titles, $7.99 for the current and next to most current, title. You might offer the first title (and oldest) for $3.99 as a teaser.

Also, working in these ranges you have somewhere (down) to go for temporary sales.

And don't be afraid, later on, to go up $9.99 for new work: Louise Penny is sold that way. Still Life is $2.99; the other books are $7.99 and the most recent title, Bury Your Dead, is $9.99>

[Shack70]

I think one of the major problems with ebook pricing is greed. Many publishers set a price for an ebook and leave it that way forever. There are tons of books on Amazon that are $12.99 for the ebook and the hardback is $2 simply to get rid of the hardbacks. The ebook is not taking up any space in a warehouse waiting to be shipped out.

Ebooks should be around $6 in my opinion. I would even say $10 for new books and $6 for anything 6 months or older. These prices are for your standard novel.

[emellaich]

... and my suggestion is free, sort of. This won't work if you have only one or two books out. However, if you have five or six then I would make the first one free, the next few 4.99, the last one, 8.99 and the most recent one 9.99. Especially if the books are all in the same series.

However, I wouldn't make it permanently free. Price it at 4.99 and then run free promotions every two weeks.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by MV64

On the flip side, if you make it too cheap off the bat (say. 1.99 or something) you run the risk of people thinking it's cheap FOR A REASON.

Usually that reason is because the book only needs to pay the author, not a whole army of hangers on. Writers typically only get about 10-20% of the proceeds of a professionally published book, so a self published book at $1.99 would need to be priced at $9.99 or more in order to generate the same income for the writer.

[boxcorner]

Originally Posted by Shack70

... greed ...

[ficbot]

I think in cases like these, you need to look at what other options the reader has. So yes, if the ebook is $12 and the mass-market paperback has been available for years at $6.99, then the ebook IS priced too high and customers will think the publisher is greedy. Similarly, if a new release by a major best-seller (Dan Brown, Grisham etc.) is $9.99 and so is a new release by a first-time indie author, I'd wager the first time indie author is going to have a tough sell.

I don't know enough about you to say where you fall on the scale, but I do know I have seen a lot of price creep lately from the indie crowd, and $9.99 on, say, Smashwords, just makes me laugh. To me that is a must-have from an author I follow. For an impulse buy from an author new to me, $2.99-4.99 is more my comfort zone.

[wolw]

I (as an outsider from Sweden) would say that all mentioned prices are from fair (10.99) to very cheap (4.99)
Stieg Larsson's books starts at $ 20.72 in Sweden
The price would be half if I'd choose to read it in English and order it from Amazon.

Paperback price for an e-book would be the norm if I had a say.

Peter

[Kali Yuga]

As I suggested in the other thread, it's not just about increasing sales. It's whether the lower price increases sales enough to produce an economic benefit.

Again, if the book normally sells for $10 and you drop the price to $2, you need to sell at least five times as many copies just to match the same revenues.

More importantly, as an experiment this wasn't constructed very well -- as might be expected from such an impromptu implementation of the concept. As a result, this may end up more as a Rorschach test than a definitive answer.

If you're genuinely interested in the psychology of pricing, by the way, you may want to hit the books and read up on behavioral economics.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

As I suggested in the other thread, it's not just about increasing sales. It's whether the lower price increases sales enough to produce an economic benefit.

Again, if the book normally sells for $10 and you drop the price to $2, you need to sell at least five times as many copies just to match the same revenues.

More importantly, as an experiment this wasn't constructed very well -- as might be expected from such an impromptu implementation of the concept. As a result, this may end up more as a Rorschach test than a definitive answer.

If you're genuinely interested in the psychology of pricing, by the way, you may want to hit the books and read up on behavioral economics.

If the eBook is $10 now and the price is lowered to say $6, I do think it will sell more copies to people how were on the fence due to the $10 price.

[Robin Spano]

leebase - yeah, it's been on the market for 2 months as an ebook at $10.99, and people have bought it at that price.

[SeaBookGuy]

Interesting that they're so firm on ebook agency pricing ... yet Borders isn't forbidden from discounting the paper copy as much as 40% (with coupon)?

[Robin Spano]

Wow - just saw all these other comments, too, from last night. Sensual poet - thanks! You seem to know a lot about Canadian mysteries. Dundurn is another Toronto press who publishes mysteries - I have a friend whose mysteries are published there.

Sensual/emellaich - A sliding scale sounds cool, too - though I admit as a reader I'd be confused by it - but having one price for the newest book in the series and a lower one for earlier books is a good idea - kind of like when a hardcover is released, and the earlier books are already available in paperback.

Shack - I agree - the industry has set the standard price too high. I'm not sure if it's due to greed or fear - I think it's fear, because if ebooks cost a lot, then people won't buy them, and the print book industry would be in less jeopardy. That's not happening, though - the world is going digital - which is why I think it's time to analyze the ACTUAL value of an ebook - not what some big publishers originally wanted them to cost.

ficbot - yeah, I agree, as a new writer, I think my book should cost less - so people take a chance on it. If they love it and want the next one in the series, awesome. But that argument will never sell my publisher, who believes that good writing is good writing, and should be valued as such. (They're idealists, which I love, but I disagree with that point.)

wolw - thanks for weighing in - sorry books are so expensive over there!!

Kali - YES, this experiment is imperfect in so many ways. The one I'd really like to try would be 6 months at $4.99. This was what my publisher offered, so I took it. I'm hoping the results are strong enough that he lets me try the long term one - i.e., one where the results will actually mean something.

JS Wolf - thanks! I agree. It's not that a lower price will make someone want the book, but if they're browsing and it looks cool, the lower price will turn interest into a sale more quickly, I think.

SeaBookGuy - I know. these rules are so bizarre. The industry makes very little sense to me - but since I love writing more than anything else in the world, I'm trying to figure it out enough to make a living from it. But yeah - the strange rules you see can be so nutty.

[Robin Spano]

And, the experiment is over, the results are in . . . summarized here on Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show...bin_Spano/blog

Thanks for everyone's participation. I enjoyed the discussions.

[Namekuseijin]

Indeed it should be way lower when you realize there's no need for people to be paid to bring forests down, to transport and process the dead trees into paper, to buy lots of ink and glue, to pay for lots of hardcover, to pay for hundreds of printing machines requiring managers, technicians and maintenance, no transportation, no salesmen at the door of each store etc.

It's just an author, his editor and a publisher spending just in marketing and server storage and bandwidth.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

Indeed it should be way lower when you realize there's no need for people to be paid to bring forests down, to transport and process the dead trees into paper, to buy lots of ink and glue, to pay for lots of hardcover, to pay for hundreds of printing machines requiring managers, technicians and maintenance, no transportation, no salesmen at the door of each store etc.

It's just an author, his editor and a publisher spending just in marketing and server storage and bandwidth.

The servers, networks and software also need someone to make them and maintain them. I don't say the cost is comparable, just that you can't go into such details for paper books and ignore them for ebooks.