How low is too low? There are tons of books on the Amazon Kindle for very small prices, many even for free. I know for a fact I've been reading a lot more since I bought my Kindle 3 than ever before, and I've noticed more people with Kindles everywhere. People are noticing I've got one and asking about it, so there's still a lot of interest in them. Also, Christmas is coming up, which means more Kindles will be around.
Smashwords is also a very popular site for buying books because they translate them into many formats. The prices there are quite reasonable as well.
There's lots of competition out there, and that's for sure. To compete with the market, I've reduced Killer Career today to the low price of 99 cents at both sites. The new price should be showing up in a day or so, if it hasn't already. Is that too low, or is it a smart market move?
What's your take?
Morgan Mandel
Killer Career at Smashwords, Amazon
4 comments:
I priced my short stores at 99 cents at both Kindle and Smashwords. But my full length novel is $2.99, which I still think is a reasonable price, given the original print version was hard cover at $25.95. With the Kindle setup, $2.99 is the price point for the 35 vs 70% royalty rate.
Don't know if I'd sell enough at a lower price to make up the difference. I think most of it is really marketing and promotion, as long as pricing isn't over the top.
Terry
Terry's Place
Romance with a Twist--of Mystery
A low price would definitely attract a lot of attention, especially in today's economy...but I agree with Terry on her point as well. Are you making any money selling them at that low of a price?
Is this a permanent price reduction or a "sale"?
Price needs to be set at a level to maximize profits. In an electronic age, there is little to no cost to produce a book. I am talking about the physical/ethereal product, not the writing of one.
So, price is a tool we can use for electronic books to experiemnt to see what price point produces the maximum revenue.
If you have a good product and price inhibits sales, then the price is too high. So, using my out of the box logic, ninety-nine cents can be more than five dollars and ninety-nine cents.
Writers have traditionally seen price as an ego issue. In the pre-electronic media days, the books assigned the label, "best sellers" sold regardless of price and the writer was paid royalties that could amount to significant money.
In the electronic era, price becomes a relevant key in sales of everything except those authors who have established hard-core fan bases whose books would sell mega-copies if all they did was use the pages to blow their noses in.
However, people like me have been called mid-list authors because sales ranged from 500 - 50,000 hard copies, price was set by the publisher and most of our work was remaindered to an off-price schlock house that diuscounted the books at no royalty to the writer. It was my feeling that we could increase sales exponentially if we had control over price.
At 99 cents, you can have ten thousand people take a flier because the blurb for your book sounds interesting while at five-ninety-nine, they will take a pass on it and twelve copies may sell.
So, would you rather have 50% of $10,000 or 50% of $72. AS I said, $.99 is far more than $5.99.
99 cents will sell more, but you have to reach those targets, for a midlist author that maybe the way to go. Or you can start at 2.99 and at some point sell the book for 99 cents and market it as such. A Sale.
Or maybe we should just use Joe Konrath's name and be done with it.
www.mjustes.com
A Hotel in Paris
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