Today almost got away from me. I explain how.
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Have you read the essay by Brion Humphrey on the Round Table? He says it better that any of us folks. It is about how you can’t procrastinate because—-well, as I said, he nails it.
Please don’t listen to Ridan on your prices. Bad idea IMO. $4.95 is already a high price point for many ebook readers. $5.95 could be likely to lose you more readers than getting that extra $1 would gain you.
This might not be what you want to hear, but I’ll be blunt anyway. If I hadn’t been so captured by the sample of Quarter Share I almost certainly wouldn’t have paid $4.95 for such a short book. I’m also not a fan of series that charge more for books as the series goes on. It reeks of the author/publisher milking their fans for cash. I realize that the money aspect has a lot more meaning for you, but charging by length might not be the way to do it.
Sorry for the broken thoughts there. Just an opinion–take it as you will.
I find myself agreeing with Tony again. Twice in one week, must be a trend. I have been reading about 30 Kindle books a month for the last couple of years and I have only paid $4.00 or more for a book (don’t buy paper books of any kind) a very few times. I can only think right now of about 6 maybe 8 that I have. I have stopped reading several authors based just on price. Michael Sullivan, Naomi Novik and David Weber e-books to name a few. All of them started out in my price range then priced me out. I fully understand the need for you to make money. I do not read your books I just buy them to provide support to you so you can keep writing. I have listened to the podcast of all your books 6 times now. That is more than I have ever read a single book in my life. That is my 2 cents and about all it is worth.
Congratulations! It’s been a long road!
I too lean towards the $4.95 mark, just because it might create a bad image of gouging to raise the price of the last book. I’m also leaning towards the current cover, without the container, because the “barbell” aspect is much clearer in this image than it might be otherwise.
I had a comment on this point a couple of days ago, I think. But from a slightly different direction –
I’m not a fan of the constant upward pressure on prices.
We each value a book differently. And when we go to set prices, we look around, and say “My book is better (longer, whatever) than those – surely it’s worth a bit more.” But someone else then looks at that, and says “My book might not be as long, but that’s because I did a better job editing, and so my book is worth a bit more.”
At some point, certainly – you hit the peak. Raising the price means you get fewer readers, but the additional amount you make means you’re still making more. Eventually, though, the drop-off in number of readers falls faster than the rise in profits. And of course, oddly enough, free or 99 cents or whichever price you consider a loss-leader doesn’t mean you’re going to have the maximum number of readers.
And yet – there’s also the thing about businesses… Sure, the point of a business is to make a profit, but many people don’t consider that profit isn’t always in the form of cash. Nor do they consider that while the point of a business is to make a profit – it doesn’t *HAVE* to be to make as big a profit as possible. Especially when profit *is* measured in money – this can result in sociopathic behavior on the part of corporations, as it may be more profitable to break the rules and pay the fine.
Gotta agree on the 4.95 issue…. the books are about £3.15 here which is a great price. I’d gladly pay up to $10 for them but I’m a fan. Sure, you could up the price a tad and most of your fans would pay anyway but the 4.95 is a bit of a sweet spot for an ebook. Not too little that it devalues the work but not so much that it might put off someone who’s buying it on impulse.
I don’t know what your non-fan sales are like but if you up the price it might be a barrier to entry for some potential fans whilst at the same time not netting you that much more cash. I think the books having a uniform price shows that you aren’t (as noted above) trying to grab a bit more from your existing readers. For paperbacks of course the price goes up but for ebooks I think you benefit more from being in the sweet spot and having a nice, honest-looking, uniform price than you would from the extra cash on the bigger books.
If you were to up the price on the bigger books, you could always throw in a copy of A Light in the Dark or something else that doesn’t bring in a lot of revenue (I’m assuming that it doesn’t for the purposes of this example). That would make it look like you were trying to counter act the price increase with a bit of free stuff (which might not cost you much in lost A Light in the Dark sales).
As always, just my 2p 🙂
I was going to suggest, “Would it work if you priced at at $5.95 and then a month later dropped the price down to $4.95?”, but I think the problem with that strategy is that you might end up with your highest visibility (Amazon rank) from true-fan purchases while the price was too high for impulse buys from not-yet-fans ($5.95) … and then have too low a sales rank to really grab a lot of not-yet-fans when you drop the price to impulse-buy levels ($4.95).
So … I think I’m inclined to agree with the other posters. I am not an expert, so I may be wrong, but it feels like there’s a bigger psychological barrier to >$5 than <$5, so you might end up making less money and gaining fewer fans (each one of whom might be inclined to buy other already-published books or future books).
P.S. Like everyone else, I completely understand that dead-tree editions have to be more expensive when they have more pages! You should certainly price them so that you have at least the same profit margin as for the shorter works. 🙂