The publishers worried aloud to one another that the $ 9.99
ebook price point would lead to the erosion of hardcover prices, to ever - greater ebook popularity, and ultimately, perhaps, to demands by Amazon that the publishers lower their wholesale prices.
Which is to say that we need to ask the question of why Amazon decided to use the $ 14.99
eBook price point — which to my knowledge none of my eBooks has ever been priced at — to contrast with the $ 9.99 price point.
A % of people at a $ 14.99
eBook price point would instead opt for the similarly priced physical copy, which I imagine equates to more profit to Hachette.
So the gas /
ebook price point analogy may be a page from the past that's still true today.
But I've yet to meet a reader who thinks compensating lots of people who aren't the writer is a good argument for a $ 9.99 - $ 12.99
ebook price point.
The $ 9.99
ebook price point was not set by market forces.
Including this whole piece of work, which as many folks including you have observed, is about far deeper, longer range issues than tomorrow's
ebook price points.
In the past several years, Coker has found that a good
ebook pricing point seems to be $ 3.00 - 3.99.
eBook price points, sales and free days are fantastic ways to gain more traction for your book.
Apart from the publicly available data about the lower end of
eBook price points capturing reader's attention, the latest data analysis from the German website, die Self - Publisher - Bibel, suggests that between $ 0 and $ 2 is not necessarily the sweetest spot in terms of revenue in several markets that readers chase after.
Not exact matches
A return to Amazon's $ 9.99
price point is a veritable certainty, while the fact that
ebook prices rose in general once Apple entered the market seems like a pretty damning fact in general.
I may very well write another
ebook with a lower
price point about specific topics.
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My
ebooks are
priced at 4.95 with Ridan because they did run a lot of numbers looking at
pricing with Michael J. Sullivan's books and determined that sales in that niche were maximized at the 4.95
price point.
Let me state this one more time: I don't think lowering
ebook prices costs anyone money unless and until they drop under that magic
point.
So the optimal
price point for an
ebook would be between 3 and 4 dollars.
Your curve demonstrates optimal profit
points for
ebook pricing, but the goal of a publishing house is to maximize TOTAL profits.
Let us list the ways: 99 - cent
price point for
ebooks.
It has become clear that publishers either don't understand the economics of
ebooks (or of customer demand and
price points) or they don't care.
If you're trying to make your entire living with
ebooks, a low
price point can be tricky.
But you can also use the lower
price point to your advantage by using
ebooks as ultra low - risk entry
points to your business.
But all this is assuming (A)
ebook growth will continue to a saturation
point — it could be this is all new and shiny and the early adopters are hoarding a lifetime's supply of books (B) as Joe
pointed out, NY will hang onto artificially inflated
prices for
ebooks for too long and give lesser - known authors their one current competitive advantage of
price and (C) people will still be willing to pay for
ebooks, or any content, in five years.
That's a good
point about YA and their typical hardcover releases affecting
ebook prices.
I sell my
ebooks for $ 4.95, so the obvious
price point for an eARC would have been something similar, but I didn't think it'd be worth my time to set everything up, email people (I mistakenly, didn't think of automation this first time around — more on that farther down), and deal with the inevitable «customer service» emails I'd get for $ 5.
The royalties (or whatever you want to call it, but again I'm using royalty because that's the generally accepted term) on
ebooks sold in Japan, India, Brazil, and Mexico is 35 %, unless you're in KDP Select, at which
point you get 70 % as long as it meets the
price requirements.
Technically, an indie can put a book out without spending a dime (though hiring an editor, at the least, is recommended), meaning that even 99 - cent
ebooks can result in tidy profits, whereas traditional publishers must put a lot more money into the process and can't afford
price points like that, at least not in the long run.
For
ebooks that come in under 10,000 words, authors often choose 99 cents as a
price point, and I'm in agreement with that choice.
When I see a lot of new novels in SF / F coming out at digital
price points of $ 12.99, $ 13.99, and $ 14.99, or novellas coming out at
price points like $ 9.99, then yes, I'm going to buy fewer new
ebooks.
The sweet spot It seems to me, as
pointed out by Catherine Ryan Howard and others, that the sweet
price for a novel published as an
ebook is currently $ 2.99; sweet as in a decent return for the author, a cheap offer for the customer and not demeaning to the work.
We also discussed
ebook pricing and the $ 2.99
price point (and J.A. Konrath) that I blogged about last month.
Meanwhile, the sales on the
ebook editions of Faerie Blood and Bone Walker are over, and both books have reset to their $ 4.99
price points.
Price point for
ebooks is a marketing issue.
Books Butterfly provides many options over a wide range of
price points for advertising your
ebook in its enewsletter, on several websites, and through its social media pages.
Publishers are seeing squeezed profit margins and they are clearly on notice about how third parties such as Amazon are controlling the perception of what
pricing should be for
eBooks (with their $ 9.99
price point or lower).
A few years ago it was a big deal when E Ink
ebook readers finally hit the sub - $ 100
price point; now just half of that can get you the entry level Kindle.
Goodreads
eBooks are in ePUB format, DRM - free, with authors setting the
price and getting 70 % of the revenue, payable via check or Paypal at any
point after they've earned $ 50.
Moreover, Olson and Anand
point out that the
pricing of
ebooks, as a stand - alone business, can provide for a wide variety of dynamic
pricing based on time - based or other economic incentives that could actually far surpass the revenue available via the current book distribution model (something akin to a consignment shop).
I have held the line at $ 9.99 since there is so much good stuff out there at that
price point or less, but I resent having to pay more than paper at any time for an
ebook, and I don't want to read paper when I have my kindle.
Despite the perceived limitations of
eBooks as a delivery format for poetry, the low
price points available to the DIY publishing poets could open wider markets that just aren't there in print.
As the owner of an
ebook and ereader blog that is heavily invested in research into the tablet industry, I would advise windows tablet purchasers to wait about a year before buying to give software developers and microsoft the chance to work the bugs out as well as the
price to come down to the
point it appeals to mainstream consumers rather than early adopters.
One key
point Howey made in reference to Amazon's new
pricing tool, KDP Pricing Support, is this: «While Amazon's been fighting with publishers to get ebook prices down, I also think that a lot of self - published authors aren't pricing their books high
pricing tool, KDP
Pricing Support, is this: «While Amazon's been fighting with publishers to get ebook prices down, I also think that a lot of self - published authors aren't pricing their books high
Pricing Support, is this: «While Amazon's been fighting with publishers to get
ebook prices down, I also think that a lot of self - published authors aren't
pricing their books high
pricing their books high enough.
eReading is a great opportunity for them, since
eBooks use relatively low bandwidth and have an attractive consumer
price point in a mobile operator environment», adds Christophe Maire, CEO of txtr.
While that
price point may seem a little high for an unknown author — many self - published authors keep their sales at $ 4.99 or less, with $ 2.99 being a fairly standard
ebook price for indie works — given the argument that the cost of the book is in its initial creation, it makes sense.
The top end of the range prevents authors and publishers from listing their
ebooks at overly inflated
prices, since Amazon wants to make sure there is enough content available for its millions of Kindle fans, all at an enticing
price point.
Hardcover sales in adult trade fiction and non-fiction combined increased to a total of $ 1.5 billion in 2013;
ebooks in fiction - only sold almost as much as hardcover for both fiction and non-fiction for adults — despite the typically lower
price point of
ebooks compared to hardcover and paperback — a fact that speaks to the need to revamp the strategy by which publishers perceive digital - first and
ebook - only.
I suspect at some
price point there will be a lot of readers like me who will suddenly be willing to spend money on new
ebooks who were never in the calculation before.
ebooks sell at a lower
price point than other information products such as ecourses, which means you have to sell a lot to make money.
I can
point to a lot of instances ON AMAZON where the print
price is less than the
ebook price.
(I'm sure he'll reclaim his cred when he re-writes Chapter 7 for the Kindle version of the book — and takes out the «
eBooks are doomed» part and that part where he quotes «the experts» who claim it will take a $ 1 - $ 2
price point for
eBooks to ever catch on.)
Price elasticity: publishers are finding that their overall ebook revenue is higher at current price points that it had been at lower price points: this is clearly a possibility, although common sense seems to suggest «nay&ra
Price elasticity: publishers are finding that their overall
ebook revenue is higher at current
price points that it had been at lower price points: this is clearly a possibility, although common sense seems to suggest «nay&ra
price points that it had been at lower
price points: this is clearly a possibility, although common sense seems to suggest «nay&ra
price points: this is clearly a possibility, although common sense seems to suggest «nay».