Let the price experiments begin!

Ninety-nine cents is the lowest price allowed by Amazon and Barnes & Noble for an ebook.** For a novel, 99¢ is basically a giveaway price, a means to try to move a lot of copies in the hope that a book’s ranking will improve and that the author will develop a fan base, but–given that the author gets only 35% minus a penny or two for a transaction fee–it’s no way to make a living.

(Full disclosure: ebooks priced at $2.99 and higher pay 70% to the author, which is why you rarely see anything priced between rock bottom and $2.99–you’re either giving it away or you’re not.)

For a short story though, especially a reprint, 99¢ is a reasonable price from a reader’s perspective, and useful to the author if a sample of a higher-priced work is bundled with the short story.

Short stories have a word count up to 7,500, according to standards set by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. My story Goddesses is not short. In fact, it’s a 30,000 word novella, but it still makes a good subject for this price experiment. I’ve had it at $2.99 for most of the year, to take advantage of the 70% royalty, but yesterday I dropped it to 99¢ just to see if it makes any difference at all. Frankly, I’m not expecting much, but if anyone is interested in the statistics let me know and I’ll try to remember to post them here as time goes by.

So if you haven’t seen it yet, check out the Nebula-award-winning novella Goddesses–just 99¢ and available from these vendors:

Barnes & Noble
Amazon USA

Prices may have not filtered through to Amazon’s non-USA markets just yet, but here are the links:
Amazon UK
Amazon DE
Amazon FR

** Yes, there are free ebooks, but an author can’t set the price to free. The only way to do it is to figure out how to sell the ebook for free somewhere else and hope Amazon’s search engines find out. Then Amazon will automatically reduce the price of the book to match.

Posted on: Saturday, October 15th, 2011 at 3:24 pm
Categories: My E-books, Publishing.
Tags: 99¢ ebooks, ebook pricing, ebook promotional pricing, ninety-nine cent ebooks