$.99 eBook becomes biggest earner

[SlowRain]

This is often the case: lower the price, sell more, make more money. That's why industries flourish once competition is introduced, rather than stagnate in a monopoly. It's the old guard that holds out, yet they're the ones who stand to gain the most. Don't these people, who publish books no less, ever read them?

[FizzyWater]

Boy, I hate to speak up for higher prices, but unless it's an author I already know-and-love, or it's a promo deal from a mainstream publisher, I tend to assume $0.99 = garbage! For a 50,000 word book, I think anything between 2.50 and 3.50 is fair.

[charleski]

Projecting 2 months' sales out to a whole year is obviously problematic, but that doesn't negate the fact that $20k for a book ($122k from his 6 books) is a very decent return for an author, so he's doing well even if he never sells another copy.

This sort of strategy probably works best for genre authors like Locke and Konrath, who have a large number of works on the store, all at very cheap prices - people buy one on impulse, then if it's not too terrible there's a good chance they'll go back and snap up all the rest. They're easy-to-read books that people will devour rapidly on the train to work then come back for more. It's a good fit for writing aimed at the mass-market audience where volume is everything. When Locke says, "I'm not writing for the masses," he's being deeply disingenuous - the 99c strategy is a mass-market strategy, and all the stuff about one-star reviews coming from people outside your target market is nonsense - the target is everyone (though at least Locke is a bit more phlegmatic about it than Konrath's bluster).

But there's a lot more going on here than pricing. While the price is an important factor in reaching the mass impulse-buy market, anyone who thinks that they can become a best-seller just by setting their ebook at 99c will be sadly disappointed. Take a look at Stephen T. Harper's comment on the JK blog post - his books are 99c, yet his "King's X Episode 1: Visions" is languishing down at #40,165 in the store. Focussing on the price is obscuring what's really going on here - it seems that Locke conducted a well-aimed marketing campaign on twitter that was the real secret to his success. There are lots of books at 99c now, and no doubt there will be a lot more over the next year - your book might be cheap enough to take a gamble on, but it still needs to stand out from the crowd.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

At that price, you start to get a lot of the impulse buys. At higher prices, people start thinking more about whether or not they want it.

If the price is permanent why do you get impulse buyers? Why do people not wait until they want to read the book to buy it?

Even so a certain number of book will be bestsellers in this way. But I doubt it will be more than 10-100 a year. And that will not support only a very small amount of all the authors.

[jhempel24]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

At that price, you start to get a lot of the impulse buys. At higher prices, people start thinking more about whether or not they want it.

+1

Yep, I've spent like $10 in a day on 10 ebooks before I knew how much I even spent. LOL.

[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by tompe

If the price is permanent why do you get impulse buyers? Why do people wait until they want to read the book to buy it?

Even so a certain number of book will be bestsellers in this way. But I doubt it will be more than 10-100 a year. And that will not support only a very small amount of all the authors.

At that price, people are more likely to buy it as soon as they find out about it. Yeah, it won't make everyone a best seller, but it cannot hurt low end authors that didn't expect to sell many copies.

[wodin]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

At that price, you start to get a lot of the impulse buys. At higher prices, people start thinking more about whether or not they want it.

Works for me, I'll drop a buck without a thought, and just chalk it up to experience if I don’t like it. I’ll look much harder at a $10 to $20 price point.

[altworld]

Originally Posted by Fbone

Keep in mind John Locke's two books on Amazon's list are only 200 pages long or about 50,00 words.

Edit: I checked on Smashwords and they are less than 42,000 words.

Keep in mind that Hitchhikers to the Galaxy clocks in just under 50K and Fahrenheit 451 just about scraps in under 48K. Word count is not a value to how good a story is.

I've read some stinkers that are over 100K and go nowhere for 95K of those words (if you are lucky), and I've read some wonderful shorts and novellas that extremely thrilling.
Arigato,
Nick Davis

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

After reading the article yesterday, I've been considering whether or not this experiment might work for me. I'm currently debating either:

• Picking a book (or maybe even the three Kestral books) and dropping the price to .99;
• dropping my entire catalog to .99; or
• pricing my next new and re-released book(s) at .99.

I want to give it fair thought, because it's not just a matter of changing it in one place: I have to make changes in the Kindle store, the PubIt! store, Smashwords, and my own site, for each book (in each format). You don't want to do all that on pure impulse.

There's also the issue that my current prices ($2.99) aren't so high that this represents a huge drop.

[snipenekkid]

I've been pondering why, exactly, the $0.99 price could work even for crap titles. It's could be that people are lazy, face it we all are, and to a lot of folks spending a buck is faster and easier than book marking it then trying to remember why it's bookmarked along with all their other bookmark-bloat.

Think about people you know. How many really know what a bookmark in a browser is for or even how to keep them organized. I bet many have just horrid looking "favorites" folders. Buying right then and there is probably a very reasonable option for this sort of magpie reader who will just keep gathering even without a valid reason. Hence the impulse buys increase rapidly at that price point.

[GreenMonkey]

This is part of why I'm amused at the agency pricefixing schemes. It's pretty basic economics that lowering prices can lead to higher demand. It's all in finding the right balance of price vs demand.

I hate DRM with a passion and almost never buy anything with it. In my eyes DRM devalues a book by quite a bit - still, I'll buy a DRM'd book at "rental" pricing. Same way I put up with DRM'd videogames when they go under $10.

With ebooks lacking the printing / distribution costs of a paper book, there's a real opportunity here for ebooks to increase sales, like DVDs did for a long time. You can move a lot of units at $4 and $6 that you might not otherwise.

Instead, they seem to cling to the same model the music industry did - keeping prices more in line with the old pricing and try to keep them there. That said, I'm sure they sell a lot of music on the periodic Amazon album sales when they dip to $6, $4, $3, etc.

I think a better scheme is to start higher, and drop prices over time, like the DVD market. The price drop from hardcover to paperback moves units...a few later price drops to put them in $6 bargain bin DVD pricing, and then to $.99 or $1.99 even, seems like it would be a good scheme.

You can't move it too fast - to some extent, cutthroat pricing is what IMO killed the anime market - but over time, it should drop. A book that is 10 years old should really be at pricing that is more in line with a used bookstore hardcover or paperback than $12 or $16.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I am a little puzzled:



350,000 downloads at $1 (let's make it round figures) means sales of (obviously) $350,000. 35% of $350,000 is $122,500. Where does this figure of "well over $500k" come from?

Someone's less then remedial math skills?

I was wondering the same thing when I read it.

[JSWolf]

If name brand author's eBooks were priced at say $10 (when only in hardcover) and $5 (when going to any version paperback), they'd sell a lot more and both the publisher and the author would make more money. Sounds logical to me.

[snipenekkid]

question. At the $0.99 price does the free sample go away given there is less margin to work with? I am not sure I would even give the lack of a sample a second thought, though many might.

I know right now I burn through a LOT of samples from Amazon for reference books, I know different animal. But I don't think I've downloaded more than a couple samples of fiction titles since the K1 first was released. So I am not sure the samples matter for me when looking at fiction or entertainment titles. I am the sort who barely even reads the back cover or dust-jacket because I want the whole thing to be new to me going into the book. I just want to read enough to decide is the idea of the book is likely to be something I find interesting. I can adapt to any writing style and am not that fussy to need a sample for fiction.

[covingtoncat73]

I welcome .99 books because, as others have said, you are more likely to try a new author whose book sounds good. I bought a .99 book, Goblin Market, off of Smashwords even though I have no eReader and I am not going to read a book on my laptop because it sounded of interest to me (love fantasy, love the Rosetti poem that inspired it) but if we were talking about an $8 paperback, I might have decided to put it on hold and forgot about it.