Streaming, Sharing, Stealing

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Pharmacies and convenience stores/gas station shops seem to do fine despite objectively (but not objectionable) high pricing. I've seen some of the gas stations adding home repair tools in addition to the expected auto tools. A lot of that is maximizing the take from the traffic you get. Covenience and timeliness factor into the buy-no buy, buy here or order online and wait, decisions. It doesn't always favor online.

Likewise, higher pricing per-se isn't offensive as long as it stays within range of the sweet spot. We see a lot of this with Indie books where proper pricing (or price jogging) can be very profitable. The sweet spot globally is known to be around $4 but it varies by genre and by author. Romance typically clusters around $3, SF around $5. Variance of a buck or so from the genre baseline isn't necessarily a dealbreaker if the author has a track record with the buyer.

Which is one reason for the toys and trinkets Indigo/Chapters has done so well with (reportedly) and B&N not quite as well. On the latter end, I recently saw a comment to chew on re: store layouts. I saw a comment by a parent saying she and many she knew now actively avoided B&N while shopping for kids books because of "the toy gauntlet", having to drag the kids past all the pricey, "enticing" toys they aren't going to get, in order to even look at the books.

Valid point.
Toys and kids books might seem like a good fit...during the xmas season. The rest of the year?

Directing traffic through B&M stores is an art; it can be a plus or a minus.
Online it's "simpler": just minimize the steps needed to find any specific item, either through indexed categories, search, or both. (Not that doing either right is trivial, as Walmart, Rakuten, and B&N.com prove. Haven't heard great things about Kobo's search, either.)

Like so many commercial activities, there are way more ways to get things wrong than there are of getting things right.

The problem is that what you call the sweet spot price wise is pure SWAG, not based on the data. We don't have the data on ebook sales, we only have Amazon rankings and a few SWAGS put out by a consulting group that's taken as gospel by some, but doesn't have access to the real data and has been called highly inaccurate by some authors based on what was said about their sales.

The idea that the sweet spot is $4 for an ebook is counter to the fact that people are actually paying quite a bit more than that and making quite a bit of money doing so. Looking at some of the name authors backlist, $7 seems to be a real popular price for a backlist book.

Part of point that the authors were making is that for the most part, entertainment such as music, books and movies is not generic and may should have a price model that reflects that. People are simply willing to spend more on the latest Adele music than they are for some midlist artist.

[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.

[fjtorres]

On the streaming side of things, it looks like the economics of streaming services are headed to live sports. Twitter and Yahoo are dabbling and now Amazon is angling for Tennis and rugby. Both Sony and Sling offer live sports (via ESPN/Fox) and NBC has been streaming Olympics for a while but that is as an extension of existing distribution deals.

This is streaming-only distribution:

http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-may-...aming-service/

There's a lot of money in subscription services.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

On the streaming side of things, it looks like the economics of streaming services are headed to live sports. Twitter and Yahoo are dabbling and now Amazon is angling for Tennis and rugby. Both Sony and Sling offer live sports (via ESPN/Fox) and NBC has been streaming Olympics for a while but that is as an extension of existing distribution deals.

This is streaming-only distribution:

http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-may-...aming-service/

There's a lot of money in subscription services.

Don't forget WatchESPN. ESPN has really improved that service and it's especially nice for replays. I watched a replay of the GT/Mercer football game this morning without commercials. I would gladly pay a $10 per month subscription fee for WatchESPN (right now, it's free if you have ESPN on cable).

[pwalker8]

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.