Writer Joe Konrath, who publishes with Hyperion has some Kindle books published by his publisher; he owns electronic rights to some back-list titles, and he self-published those to Kindle. He’s got a post with some interesting discussion about the value of publishing, royalties etc in the age of the ebook, but more interesting I think were his discoveries about ebook pricing.
Because he was self-publishing some titles, he could play with the price-point. And here is what he found:
We can draw some simple conclusions looking at these numbers.
* Ebooks priced at $4 sell an average of 1100 ebooks per year.
* Ebooks priced at $8 sell an average of 342 ebooks per year.
* Ebooks priced at $2 sell an average of 4900 ebooks per year.
It doesn’t take a math whiz to see that the biggest profit is with low priced ebooks. [more...]
Read the rest, it’s well worth it.
3 Comments
cut the price in half and
you sell 4 times as many.
konrad ain’t the first to
report this is the case…
what he will also find is
low prices retain fans…
and nurturing your fans
builds you a long future.
-bowerbird
I’ve been considering this as well for our line of books, and would love to hear your feedback
There seems to be a big distinction between books and other types of media that will make the relative value of a book decrease dramatically.
A cd takes an hour to listen to.
A magazine article takes a few minutes to read.
A movie takes a couple hours to watch.
A book takes hours if not days to read.
People will buy more music at a cheaper price because they can enjoy it. The same is true with movies.
But—books seem to be a different beast. The cost to a book reader becomes less of a monetary investment and more of a time investment. People’s time can’t expand once everyone starts charging a few dollars for their ebooks.
BUT!
I do see a huge win in new authors giving things away for cheap or free. They have to build an audience.
> I do see a huge win in new authors giving things away
> for cheap or free. They have to build an audience.
and what do the non-new authors do, once a reader has
a choice of literally _thousands_ of freely-offered books
– which collaborative filtering systems have culled from
a pool of literally _millions_ of freely-offered books —
that can be certifiably trusted to be well worth reading?
the only choice those non-new authors have will be to
offer their own books freely and hope they will also be deemed worthy by those collaborative filtering systems.
does this mean authors have no chance of compensation?
hardly.
readers _love_ authors. (”fan” is short for “fanatic”.)
so readers will “return the favor” of the author’s gift
by offering the author a gift — probably monetary –
and the new world that results from this gift-exchange
will be a far better place for everyone, author and fan.
the only people left out of the picture are middlemen…
-bowerbird