Ebook Pricing
March 8th, 2011Ebook pricing and sales have been hot topics lately. For those not following the issue, here’s a quick summary:
The top end: mostly books by traditional publishers; usually $9.99. Sometimes more for big new releases; sometimes less for older titles.
The middle: lots of midlist writers who are republishing their backlist, plus confident newer writers: $2.99 – $5.99
The discounters: novels priced at 99-cents. Yes, you read that right.
Disclosure: as I write this, my books are priced between $2.99 and $5.95. I’ve shifted the pricing around and haven’t noticed any change whatsoever in rate of sales, which continue at a slow trickle. This makes sense to me, personally, because of who I am as a reader, and here’s why:
I’ve paid $9.99 for several books and been happy to do it because I’ve gotten good books out of it, and a book will keep me entertained much longer than a movie. I haven’t yet been persuaded to pay more than $9.99, but at this price point, the limiting factor is not so much the cost, but my time. Offer me a 99-cent ebook and my first suspicion is that you’re asking me to use my very limited reading time to read crap.
(I’m not saying that a 99-cent ebook IS crap. I’m saying that it’s natural to suspect that it is.)
Well, I don’t want to read crap, even if it’s free. I’d rather pay to get something that isn’t going to annoy, irritate, or bore me. So it wouldn’t matter to me particularly if I paid $4.99 or $9.99 for an ebook, if the sample chapters showed it to be good.
But one thing I’ve learned in life is that I am not very representative of “most people” (whatever that means). Lots of 99-cent ebooks have sold well enough to bring in a lively income to their publishers, sometimes an eye-popping income.
And once a book starts selling on Amazon, the Amazon algorithms kick in, promoting the book and generating more sales.
So a lot of indie authors drop their price to 99-cents to try to generate sales that will kick their book into the reach of the promotional algorithms. Fair enough.
Today I encountered a new strategy: pricing your book at 99-cents and then giving it away to people who are willing to accept it. Assuming that Amazon’s algorithms do not discriminate against multiple purchases of the same book from one account (and I have no idea whether this is the case or not) this is a very cheap and efficient way of buying your way onto a bestseller list. Imagine it: $500 will buy you 500 sales, and you’ll eventually get back 35% of that as a royalty. And 500 sales over a short period of time will get you onto a lot of lists. And once you’re on the list, people who have never heard of you will be buying your book. And if they like what they read they might go back and buy your more expensive books, and if they don’t, so what? You haven’t lost anything, because they would never have bought your books anyway.
Given the competition in ebooks, by tomorrow tens of thousands of authors will probably be giving their books away. I’m very, very tempted to try this myself.
Why am I hesitating? Pride, I guess, but really, it’s no different than giving away copies of print books to generate buzz.
So what do you think? Is this a good idea? And in the long term, is there really a future in this ebook business?
Posted on: Tuesday, March 8th, 2011 at 11:37 pm
Categories: Publishing.
March 8th, 2011 at 11:53 pm
It’s a tough call and it can depend a lot on how your existing marketing is going. One thing I have noticed though is that you need to also have a solid backing with your book on other blogs and review sites, that way once you’ve started the fire in the kindling (how appropriate for Amazon), the blog reviews and such will keep the fire burning.
At least that’s my limited view – all theory, because I’m still working on the reviews portion.
March 9th, 2011 at 12:06 am
Seth Godin’s blog is focused on his new Domino Project. If anyone can figure this ebook thing out it’s Seth. Check him out.
March 9th, 2011 at 1:24 am
@Paul I suspect you’re right about doing lots of things at one time to try to generate a wave. This is one reason I haven’t done much promotion to this point. I’m supposed to be getting the original cover art for the first four books, and I’ve been holding off on promotional efforts until that happens.
@Kean I looked at Seth Godin’s blog when he started the Domino Project, but Seth Godin is Seth Godin and already way ahead of most of us.
March 9th, 2011 at 2:11 am
I’d go for it. Consider it advertising budget. Algorithms are going to catch on at some point.
March 9th, 2011 at 9:26 am
As far as the time-wasting thing goes, the ability to download the first chapter of an eBook pretty much fixes that for me. If, when I get to the end of the free part, I still want to read the book, then I buy it. I do this with pretty much any book I’m tempted to buy, but not confident about.
I grew up on $1.95 paperbacks, which means that when I see a pulp fiction book for $9.99 or $12.99, I get sticker shock. I also know how much work goes into a book, and it’s a lot more than $1.95. So I want to pay a price that’s good for the author, but at some point I just feel like it’s too rich for my blood, and I’ll wait until the price comes down. Often I forget about the book and never wind up buying it once that’s happened.
Ebooks make this more complicated because they come with DRM, which means that I’m really buying a viewing, not a book. I often share books with my father, who’s also an avid reader. When I buy an ebook, I can’t do that, or at least I’m not supposed to. And yet ebooks are often quite expensive. If there’s any discount at all, it’s usually pretty minor. So an added challenge with ebooks is that I feel a bit insulted that I’m being charged the same price. This is really pretty irrational, because at the same time I really want to support the author. So I’m not saying this is a sensible reaction–just that it’s a reaction I definitely have every time I see a DRM’d ebook for $12.99.
I think the reason why the $0.99 trick is such a win is because it *completely* eliminates sticker shock. There’s just no way I wouldn’t pay $0.99 for a book, if it’s worth reading. It’s not a comparable price to the physical book, so my resentment about DRM doesn’t kick in–if I want my father to read it, I can just buy a copy for him. By eliminating that friction, it eliminates any resistance at all I might have to buying the book.
As far as generating buzz for the book is concerned, getting excited fans is definitely a good way to do that. I think that Amanda Hocking’s recent success has a lot to do with promo work she did outside of Amazon. I never pay attention to Amazon bestseller lists; I think they definitely help to get books into the browsing cycle of readers who’ve read similar books, so it’s definitely worth doing.
But Ms. Hocking has actually done a pretty good job on a couple of levels. Her covers are pretty attractive for “amateur” work. Her sample chapter was good enough that even though I was bothered by the grammar at first, I got over it. And *then* the $0.99 price point made it easy to just say “what the heck, I’ll keep going” when I was ambivalent at the end of the chapter. And I enjoyed the book, so now I’m receptive to reading more of them.
As for you specifically, the one thing you could do that would help me the most (I have to confess here that I haven’t gotten around to buying any of your ebooks yet, although I intend to) is to tell me which book to start with, and why. Anything you can do to reduce sales friction is a good thing… 🙂
March 9th, 2011 at 1:55 pm
I don’t mind paying $10 for a new e-book, as long as it isn’t DRMed. (If it has DRM, I consider it a rental, not a purchase, and the price I’m willing to pay drops a lot.) The challenge for me is converting my existing physical library (over 4000 books in F&SF) into an electronic format; it’s worth some money to me to free up shelf space, but I can’t afford to replace each physical volume with an electronic one at those prices.
In the long term, I think you’re going to see mechanisms of distributed arts patronage, where groups of people get together to act like a single Renaissance noble to support artists they like. If an author can get 5,000 readers to kick in $1 per month in exchange for some combination of public recognition, watermarked early releases, etc., they should be able to make a decent living.
March 9th, 2011 at 2:46 pm
@Ted I’m with you on the sample chapters. This is one of my favorite Kindle features. I don’t mind paying for a good book.
I’m old enough that I try to avoid reading mass market paperbacks with their small print and narrow inner margins. The reading experience on a Kindle is so vastly superior, and even at $9.99 ebooks are cheaper than trade paperback. That said, I’m happier paying $5.99 than $9.99 anyday.
Re: DRM etc– Shatzkin had an interesting post on this, basically saying you don’t buy an ebook, you buy a license to read a book. In any case, my books don’t have DRM.
I appreciate the tip on guiding the reader to a specific book! I’ve been doing that on twitter, but not here. I’ll post something sticky on it, but for anyone else reading here, my suggestion is to start with The Bohr Maker—a fast-paced thriller set in a nanotech-drenched world like nothing you’ve ever read before. Free samples for Kindle and Nook! 🙂
March 9th, 2011 at 3:05 pm
Hi Max. The DRM issue hasn’t been a big one for me, probably because I don’t trade books around much, but I know it annoys a lot of people, so as mentioned above, I don’t DRM mine–which is a choice I get to make, since I’m publishing them myself now. I love being able to publish the books myself. I’ve priced most of them at $4.99, which, ironically, gives me a much larger return than the author of a traditionally published novel priced at $9.99.
I understand the cost aspect in trying to convert a print library to ebook. I hadn’t even thought about that before. There aren’t many books I read more than once.
Re: patronage–I used to dream of this back in the nineties when I’d get fan mail from tech company types who (I assumed) were making a mint while I was sitting there with my long-since-spent $5K advance (15% to the agent & 4% to the state of Hawaii right off the top) and no “royalty” money to follow. So I’m all for it. Honestly, the only way I’d sit down and consider a big, serious book now is if I had a steady income from existing works.
March 10th, 2011 at 2:21 pm
Thanks. Buying The Bohr Maker certainly improved my Amazon recommendations–it kept recommending paranormal romance for some reason, but now I’m seeing more science fiction.
If you can develop a big following, you could probably use kickstarter to finance the long development cycle for a big, serious book. It’s basically a way of getting your fans to pay your advance instead of doing it through a publisher.
March 10th, 2011 at 2:28 pm
Ha ha, I love it! “Tired of recommendations for paranormal romance? Buy The Bohr Maker!” I may have to tweet that. Anyway, thanks very much for trying the book.
And kickstarter is an interesting idea for financing a big book. I’ll have to keep that suggestion in mind and see how things progress.