Ebooks

Pricing of e-books is a constant source of discussion online, and we’ve seen the rebellions in the Kindle store when publishers were allowed to start setting their own prices last year.

Some books went up in price, as traditional publishers tried to bring e-book pricing more in line with print book pricing. On the other hand, readers keep looking at the lack of reproduction costs in e-books and often moved to lower-priced alternatives.

Three other factors that seem to be driving the instability of the e-book pricing situation:

1. The tremendous increase in the volume of sales as the price declines toward $0.99, the lowest price (other than free) in the Kindle store;

    

2. The shift of royalty payements, which are 70% for books above $2.99, and 30% for books below that price; and

    

3. The ease of changing prices on your Kindle books, combined with the ease of tracking your sales on a daily basis.

To get an idea of where pricing is today, I went over to the Kindle store to have a look around.

Amazon says there are 659,063 nonfiction books in the Kindle store. I took a look at just the top 10 best sellers as of yesterday to see what the pricing looked like. Here’s what I found:

Top 10 Nonfiction Full-Length Kindle e-Books

1. $6.13 Heaven is for Real by Todd Burpo, Sonja Burpo, Colton Burpo and Lynn Vincent,
2. $12.99 Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand,
3. $11.99 The 17 Day Diet by Dr. Mike Moreno,
4. $9.99 Be a Dividend Millionaire by Paul Rubillo,
5. $9.99 Allies and Enemiesby Anne Maczulak,
6. $12.99 The Dukan Diet by Pierre Dukan,
7. $9.99 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot,
8. $9.99 Winners Never Cheat by Jon M. Huntsman and Glenn Beck,
9. $9.99 Leading at a Higher Level by Ken Blanchard,
10. $9.99 The Gospel of Ruth by Carolyn Custis James,

The average price of these e-books is $10.40. None of these e-books is self-published, by the way.

Then I went to look at the fiction titles, since this is the land of the $.99 bestseller. Here’s the way the top 10 look, pricewise:
 

Top 10 Fiction Full-Length Kindle e-Books

Amazon reports they have 267,838 fiction e-books in the Kindle store:

1. $4.17 Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
2. $7.99 The Lincoln Lawyer: A Novel by Michael Connelly
3. $9.99 Walking on Broken Glass by Christa Allan
4. $3.82 A World I Never Made by James Lepore
5. $9.59 Divine by Karen Kingsbury
6. $0.99 The Innocent by Vincent Zandri
7. $0.99 Vegas Moon (A Donovan Creed Novel) by John Locke
8. $7.99 Shattered: A Daughter’s Regret by Melody Carlson
9. $4.58 Deadworld by J.N. Duncan
10. $12.99 The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly

The average price of these books is $6.31.

This means that the average fiction e-book that’s in the top 10 in the Kindle store is retailing for a full 40% less than the average top-10 nonfiction e-book. That’s a huge hunk of change.

Does this mean it’s better to be a nonfiction author, if making money is your aim?

Yes, it does. Self-publishing has traditionally worked best for nonfiction authors with solid information-based books. There is no disputing that a new world of bookselling is upon us, and all the old rules will be scrapped or at least reexamined in the light of new realities.

Are we seeing a rebirth in fiction reading, arising from the easy availability of inexpensive novels? From anecdotal evidence, it seems so, and that is certainly a good thing.

What Price is Right For You?

I think there’s no formula that will help you set your prices. If you’re a novelist, by all means keep track of the experiments of authors like JA Konrath and Zoe Winters and Joanna Penn, you’ll learn a lot.

But this seems to be an area where you have to be willing to experiment to find the right spot for your books. Many novelists have reported selling more and more copies as they gradually lowered their price, to the point that giving up the 70% royalty, when you go below $2.99, just didn’t matter as much as the volume of sales rose. As Konrath says about his title The List, when he lowered the price from $2.99 to $0.99, he sold 20 times as many books.

Here’s what Joanna Penn had to say in her recent article on the e-book pricing situation. Joanna publishes both nonfiction and fiction, so it’s interesting to get her perspective:

I pay far more money for non-fiction books that will help me in a tangible manner than I will for fiction which I read once and then (often) forget. It’s not that I don’t value fiction writing, but the price you pay for entertainment has to be representative vs the price you pay for actionable content.

The answer? Since we are all, in a sense, direct marketers now, we should take a lesson from the direct marketing world: test everything, track the results, adjust your pricing if necessary, and test again. You will become an expert on your own book’s pricing, and this experience will be invaluable as you continue to bring more books to market.

I took this all into account when setting the price of A Self-Publisher’s Companion in the Kindle store at $8.99. Is it the right price? I’m not sure, since the book has been out just a few weeks. Will I experiment with the price? You bet I will, just like all you other direct marketers.

What have your experiences with e-book pricing taught you?

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files blog on the Idea Logical Company site on 4/25/11.

The Wall Street Journal wrote last week about what we have been concerned about for some time: how hard it will be for publishers to sustain book prices as supply (of books) rises faster than demand because of all the self-publishing being done.

WSJ built their story around John Locke, whose thrillers are 99 cents and who earned well over $100,000 in March selling them on Kindle. Locke himself put the pricing in perspective. If his books are 99 cents and most ebooks from big publishers are $9.99 and up, he doesn’t have to prove he’s as good as they are; they have to prove they’re 10 times better than he is!

I can tell you this. I’ve read one of John Locke’s books. Nobody I can think of is ten times better than he is. By his own criterion, he could readily sell for $2.99 (and be earning a higher percentage royalty) because nobody is three times better than he is, either.

Meanwhile, on a much less signficant level commercially, the ebook of The Shatzkin Files is now out from Kobo for $3.99. How did the price get set? Kobo said, “let’s put it there.” Their first thought was that it should be $4.99 but then they suggested scaling it back because, after all, the entire body of content in the ebook is on this blog, which is available free. (This establishes that anybody who buys the book is paying for the convenience afforded by the container, not for the content itself.)

I don’t know what the dilutive impact on “real” ebook sales is of The Shatzkin Files, but it is, like John Locke’s material, additional competition for books that are issued by legitimate publishing houses. It is more supply competing for the same demand.

Trying to understand the actual impact of price is very difficult. Amazon tells us that books on which they control the prices are seeing share growth over books on which the publishers control the price. That is shorthand for “99 cent and $2.99 books by self-published authors are growing share over $9.99 to $14.99 books published by the big agency publishers.” That would tend (and is certainly meant) to suggest that pricing high (and ignorantly) is hurting the big publishers’ and big authors’ revenues, but we can’t actually draw that conclusion from the data.

Read the rest of the post on Mike Shatzkin‘s The Shatzkin Files.

This post, by Kelly James-Enger, originally appeared on her Dollars and Deadlines blog on 4/24/11.

Last year I made the leap from a traditionally published girl to POD. I had strong reasons for doing so, but had no idea of what to expect in terms of actual sales. (For point of comparison, I sold about 4,600 copies of Six-Figure Freelancing the first six months after it was published–not bad at all. However, sales after that first six-month period slackened, and I have yet to earn out–though I think I will in the next three years or so.)

After considering a number of possible POD options, I chose CreateSpace for several reasons, including the overall cost, the services it provides, and its ability to turn my book around on an expedited schedule. I spent about $650 upfront (not including the cost of a proofreader, who I hired on my own) for layout, cover and interior design, and limited distribution of Goodbye Byline, Hello Big Bucks: The Writer’s Guide to Making Money Ghostwriting and Coauthoring Books. Obviously I want to recoup my investment, make a profit on the book, and eventually attract more ghostwriting clients as well.

And how do I do that? By selling the book to readers. But I admit that the first six months fell a bit short of my expectations. In the first six months since the book was published in October, 2010, I’ve sold the following:

October, 2010 24 print copies/5 Kindle editions (including one at 35%)
November, 2010 12 print copies/3 Kindle editions
December, 2010 12 print copies/3 Kindle editions
January, 2011 1 print copy/5 Kindle editions
February, 2011 15 print copies (including 3 expanded distribution)/4 Kindle editions
March, 2011 19 print copies (including 4 expanded edition)/6 Kindle editions

That makes 83 print copies (including those sold through expanded distribution) and 26 Kindle editions, for a total of 109 copies in the first six months. Not quite the numbers I was hoping for, but considering that most POD books average this number of total sales, I’m considering it just the beginning.

Read the rest of the post, which goes on to talk dollars and cents, on Kelly James-Enger’s Dollars and Deadlines blog.

Some interesting developments lately with Kindle Store bestsellers and bestselling authors….

First, congratulations to several Kindle Nation sponsors who have recently soared into the top 100 in the Kindle Store, and in some cases onto the USA Today bestseller list as well! Here’s where some of our past or current sponsors stand as I write this:

• David Lender‘s Trojan Horse is #47 in the Kindle Store, up from #11,941 prior to its first sponsorship on February 19
• Debbie Mack‘s Least Wanted is #55 and her Identity Crisis is #65 and #139 on the USA Today list (up from #3,374 and #1,048 before their first sponsorship January 18)
   
• Victorine E. Lieske‘s Not What She Seems is #86 in the Kindle Store, up from #8,000+ before her first sponsorship in September, and was on the USA Today list ealier this month
   
• And last but most definitely not least, colleague Abhi Sing of Kindle Review and his Seven Dragons team hold the #1 spot on the Kindle Store bestseller list with their magical and revolutionary Notepad app for the Kindle, which is currently featured as the Kindle App of the day here at Kindle Nation!

Meanwhile, we covered former CIA covert ops agent Barry Eisler‘s announcement the other day on Joe Konrath‘s blog that he has walked away from a half-million dollar St. Martin’s Press deal for his next two books in order to publish them directly via the Kindle and other platforms. “Direct publishing” is the new “self-publishing,” in case you hadn’t noticed, and it may be a more apt phrase since it is the platforms offered by new digital technologies such as the Kindle, rather than anything that we as authors have invented, that allow us to public and connect directly with readers.

Ruth Harris’ novel Decades, a future bestseller at 99 cents?

Eisler’s move has been widely hailed as a major development requiring — I’m sorry, there’s just not a pretty way to put this — very large cojones. And I agree, but courageous moves are seldom significant unless they blaze a trail for others. What may be most important about what Eisler has done is that there will soon be plenty more authors of distinction who follow a similar path to bring their previously published and newly published books directly to Kindle readers and other digital platforms, and it will be interesting to see how they go about the process of building fresh connections with readers, absent the usual intermediaries and gatekeepers.

One of these authors of distinction who comes naturally to mind is New York Times bestselling novelist Ruth Harris, whose Husbands and Lovers is today’s Kindle Nation Daily sponsor. Harris has sold millions of print copies of smart, stylish novels that have been translated into 19 languages and selected by the Literary Guild and Book-of-the-Month Club, and she recently brought back Husbands and Lovers, Decades and Love and Money as direct-to-Kindle offerings. Husbands and Lovers jumped from #55,528 to #5,275o on the Kindle Store bestseller list during the past few hours, and the author is priming the pump by offering Decades at a promotional price of just 99 cents. It will be interesting to see how the New York Times plays it when Harris sells enough directly published ebooks to qualify for bestseller lists, as I believe she will. The Times has taken an utterly indefensible, know-nothing stance to keep its bestseller list free of self-published authors, but if the self-published author is a former New York Times bestselling author, will she still be barred entry?

But not everyone is moving away from traditional publishers toward direct publishing. Along comes the amazing Amanda Hocking today — according to this New York Times scoop — to sign a … are you sitting down? … deal for over $2 million with MacMillan’s St. Martin’s Press for her next series, whose working series title is “Watersong.” Hocking, 26, blogged very eloquently on Tuesday about some of the reasons — in addition to the two million obvious ones — she might be interested in a traditional publishing contract. And who can blame her?

But I have to wonder how her ebooks will do if MacMillan and St. Martin’s price them in the $11.99 to $14.99 range which publishers stupidly claim is the right price for newly released ebooks. Currently Hocking has 6 titles among the Kindle Store’s Top 100 bestsellers, but they are all priced between 99 cents and $2.99. Could agency model pricing ruin the Amanda Hocking franchise?

While this is the first ebook-to-traditional publishing contract narrative to ascend to the rarified air of  the $2 million advance, there have been a few other cases where authors signed nice contracts after doing very well previously with direct-to-Kindle ebooks. A couple of years ago Boyd Morrison made a big splash when he sold enough copies of his self-published novel The Ark to crack the Kindle Store bestseller list’s Top 100 and he parlayed it into a multiple-title contract with agency model publisher Simon and Schuster. The Ark was reissued for about three times its original Kindle Store price, although Morrison’s royalty rate is less than it would be if he had published it directly at the more reader-friendly $2.99 price. Not surprisingly, The Ark has created far less buzz the second time around.

Lately it keeps occurring to me that the big traditional corporate publishers are the vanity presses of 2011. Obviously, when an author is offered a deal such as Hocking’s, nobody will blame her for signing on the line. But Morrison’s example suggests there may be plenty of others who sign away their rights for far less than they are worth because of some romantic and outmoded sense of what it means, or used to mean, to land a book deal.

This is a reprint from Stephen Windwalker’s Kindle Nation Daily.

Why would an author or publisher be interested in the Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey?

Well, first, we all know that without other authors we would be nowhere, and one of the best things about other authors is that, with a very few, largely inexplicable exceptions, authors are voracious readers.

The deadline to participate [was] midnight Hawaii time Monday, January 31, 2011. There [were] 15 questions and most people tell me it [took] them about 10 minutes from beginning to end.

But equally important is that the survey results are shaping up to spell good news of dramatic significance for indie authors and publishers. Feel free to go ahead and click here to see the results now. Here are a few of the takeaways from the first 1,900 respondents:

Respondents continue to have strong positive feelings about bestselling authors (56% positive, 3% negative), but they don’t think much of the big agency model publishers (10% positive, 41% negative). Indeed, they have much more positive feelings, for instance, about:

• Independent and emerging authors (52% positive, 1% negative)
• Small independent publishers (35.5% positive, 4% negative)
• Kindle Nation Daily (71% positive, 2% negative)

Influences such as electronic and print media reviews, bestseller lists, Oprah, or big bookstore displays in pointing readers to the books that they actually buy are in decline. Instead, respondents ranked the following, in order, as far more likely to influence them to buy books:

• recommended or listed by Amazon.
• recommended, listed, or excerpted on Kindle Nation.
• reading a free excerpt, author interview, or other material on Kindle Nation or another source.
• recommended by a friend, relative, or colleague.

Indie authors and indie publishers cannot survive without indie readers, and increasingly, readers are acting as if they are in charge when it comes to selecting the books they will read or acting as if they, the readers, are the final price-setting authorities:

• 89% of respondents identified with the statement, “I frequently choose to delay purchasing an ebook that I want to read if I believe that the price is too high.”
• 76% of respondents identified with the statement, “If publishers keep charging higher bestseller prices, I’ll buy more backlist or indie titles.”

Here, if you are interested, are links for our previous Kindle Nation Survey Results:

• Spring 2009
• Fall 2009
• Winter 2010  
• Summer 2010

This is a reprint from Stephen Windwalker’s indieKindle.