Fahrenheit 451

[mldavis2]

Just picked up an old copy at a used bookstore the other day for $1.

I think Ray is in his 90's and a bit of a Luddite on technology which is consistent with his age, out of character with his chosen genre, yet within the scope of his satire. But money talks, and it is a classic.

[Lazybones]

The e-book should be a buck or two, certainly not $10. I just made a long post about the "long tail" pricing model in the Pricing thread, and won't repeat it here; suffice it to say that electronic distribution makes deep discounts for older titles a very useful and economically desirable model. For a book like this, which has about a kajillion used copies out there, I don't see the logic of a $10 e-version. I bet if the e-book was $1 they'd sell 50x as many copies, and everyone in the chain would make more money. Certainly I'd grab a copy just for the nostalgia version alone, even though I have a paperback copy on my bookshelf at home.

[The Terminator]

In Canada from Kobo it's $12.99 plus tax with no promo's allowed

[The Terminator]

Just checked and it's the same on Amazon in Canada. Agency pricing sucks.

[Todd Young]

I don't suppose there'll be too many people burning ereaders in the future.

[ADuphily]

XKCD

[JDK1962]

Originally Posted by Lazybones

The e-book should be a buck or two, certainly not $10. I just made a long post about the "long tail" pricing model in the Pricing thread, and won't repeat it here; suffice it to say that electronic distribution makes deep discounts for older titles a very useful and economically desirable model. For a book like this, which has about a kajillion used copies out there, I don't see the logic of a $10 e-version. I bet if the e-book was $1 they'd sell 50x as many copies, and everyone in the chain would make more money. Certainly I'd grab a copy just for the nostalgia version alone, even though I have a paperback copy on my bookshelf at home.

S&S should have tried an experiment: releasing the e-book of Fahrenheit 451 at $9.99, and on the same day, releasing the e-book of The Illustrated Man or Something Wicked This Way Comes at $0.99. Then at the end of a month, see which one has returned more money to them.

Maybe they'd learn something about backlist pricing. Or have some actual evidence for their current pricing policy. Because trying to price something at $9.99 when the paperback is available for $0.01 seems kinda stupid to an ignorant layman like myself.

[miguel1626]

At this price point I won't even consider getting a legal copy....

However, I'd be willing to shell out more than $9.99 for a Dark Carnival ebook.

[andrewburt]

Originally Posted by Lazybones

I bet if the e-book was $1 they'd sell 50x as many copies, and everyone in the chain would make more money.

Out of curiosity, what pricing thread is that?

Our experiences (as a publisher) regarding "price elasticity of demand" have been that there's not as much demand change as people think, even between $.99 and $9.99. Which is to say, if people want a book, they seem to generally pay the asking price; and if they don't especially want the book, even a $.99 price doesn't do that much to entice them.

(Bear in mind too, as you may know, that under $2.99 on Amazon a KDP publisher gets half the income, 35% of the price instead of 70%, so you need to sell twice the delta just to break even. An author/publisher nets $7 on a $9.99 title, but only $.35 on a $.99 title, so you need to sell 20x as many just to break even, and more than 20x for it to be beneficial.)

In our pricing experiments, we haven't seen that high a level of increased buying. For some titles the number of sales remains the same regardless of price(!), and for some the increased number of sales at lower prices still nets less total income. Hmm.

As a publisher I'd love it if lowering the price earned more income for the author and us, but sadly that hasn't been our experience.

(As for F.451, I'm glad to see it coming out, even though I'm sad it wasn't us doing it! We bid on the rights for Bradbury's backlist, offering what I believe is the highest ebook royalty rate of any publisher, but we don't do print, and S&S apparently did a deal for both. Regardless, my dream is for all books ever published to be available as ebooks, so it's cool to see these come online. What a cool time to be living in.)

[JDK1962]

Originally Posted by andrewburt

In our pricing experiments, we haven't seen that high a level of increased buying. For some titles the number of sales remains the same regardless of price(!), and for some the increased number of sales at lower prices still nets less total income. Hmm.

As a publisher I'd love it if lowering the price earned more income for the author and us, but sadly that hasn't been our experience.

While I can readily believe this for mid-list authors (if I'm totally unfamiliar with an author, I'm unlikely to take a flyer on their book just because it's $0.99), I wonder if this would be the case for a marquee name like Bradbury.

[J. Strnad]

I won't buy it at $9.99, but to me it's an old book that I've already read. For a younger person it might be a whole new experience and worth the money.

I find that I have more than I can read at a $2.99 or less price point, so I rarely pay more than that.

[andrewburt]

Originally Posted by JDK1962

While I can readily believe this for mid-list authors (if I'm totally unfamiliar with an author, I'm unlikely to take a flyer on their book just because it's $0.99), I wonder if this would be the case for a marquee name like Bradbury.

I know what you're saying. Bradbury is clearly in a top tier, although our results were in one case for Ben Bova, who's fairly well known in hard SF.

Of course, I've heard many readers say they will take a risk on a $.99 title from an unknown author, and that's the basis of many authors pricing their work there. But as you say, readers may not actually do that.

I suspect -- or would hope! -- the major publishers do a lot of testing on optimal pricing. The fact that they price books higher rather than lower, as a general rule, makes me suspect they also see a similar elasticity trend.

[ShellShock]

It looks like it is not available in the UK either.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by ShellShock

It looks like it is not available in the UK either.

Almost certainly a case of the UK rights belonging to a different publisher, who hasn't yet produced an eBook.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by andrewburt

Out of curiosity, what pricing thread is that?

Our experiences (as a publisher) regarding "price elasticity of demand" have been that there's not as much demand change as people think, even between $.99 and $9.99. Which is to say, if people want a book, they seem to generally pay the asking price; and if they don't especially want the book, even a $.99 price doesn't do that much to entice them.

(Bear in mind too, as you may know, that under $2.99 on Amazon a KDP publisher gets half the income, 35% of the price instead of 70%, so you need to sell twice the delta just to break even. An author/publisher nets $7 on a $9.99 title, but only $.35 on a $.99 title, so you need to sell 20x as many just to break even, and more than 20x for it to be beneficial.)

In our pricing experiments, we haven't seen that high a level of increased buying. For some titles the number of sales remains the same regardless of price(!), and for some the increased number of sales at lower prices still nets less total income. Hmm.

As a publisher I'd love it if lowering the price earned more income for the author and us, but sadly that hasn't been our experience.

This has kind of been my theory on the3 pricing of a lot of e-books. The point of selling books is profit, not number sold. And for a lot of these books, you would have to have a *huge* increase in demand to see a corresponding increase in profits. And I don't think you would see this with many authors.

The universe of people who would even pay $3 for a Bradbury book is fairly limited (I'm leaving out the 99c pricing because the lower profit makes the number of additional books you need to sell for the same profit even more extreme); I would be surprised if dropping the price from $10 to $3 would cause sales to more than triple.

I.e., if Fahrenheit 451 sold 10,000 copies at $10, it would net the publisher $70,000 after Amazon, etc. takes their 30% cut. To make the same $70,000, the book would have to sell more than 35,000 copies. (As described above).

But it's more complicated than that. The advantage to pricing at $3 is that you get consumers who wouldn't buy at $10; the disadvantage is that you lose out on the $7 profit you would have made from those consumers who *would have* purchased at $10 but now don't have to.

Given that books aren't all sold at once, the best profit-maximizing approach is something like what the publishers already do: change pricing over time.

Example 2: F.451 goes on sale for $10. 10,000 buy it in the first year and the publisher makes $70,000. After a year, the publisher drops the price to $3, and the remaining 25,000 people who would have paid $3 now do so, and the publisher makes an additional $50,000, for a total of $120,000 - better than either $10 or $3 pricing.

[And of course it's more complicated that that - the publisher would probably drop the price first to something like $6 to get the additional profit from the people who would pay $6 but not $10, and then after another year drops the price down to $3.

And of course (at least for someone like Bradbury), there are always new customers who might pay $10 after a couple of years for a variety of reasons, including having just gotten a new e-reader].

So I think that pricing is pretty complicated, but that what publishers are doing often really does make sense wrt making a profit. Or at least it's not completely stupid.

But the actual numbers are going to be different for authors who are not top tier like Bradbury - random midtier author backlist probably won't be worth as much as F.451.]