Do 99p ebooks make sense?

[Brian Clegg]

Currently, two of my ebooks are on Amazon Kindle at 99p (Inflight Science and Dice World), and I'm really not sure how I feel about this.

Sometimes it works out really well. By being priced this way, the ebook can get up high in the Amazon rankings and get a lot more visible. Despite being a fraction of the usual earning per book, if they get well up the ranking they do sell a lot more copies. And if they get high enough, they continue to sell above the usual rate for up to a month after they return to normal price.

But sometimes the book doesn't sell enough to become particularly visible, so just trundles along with slashed profits and no benefits. It's certainly a gamble.

Of course this is one of the benefits of ebooks: it's possible to make this kind of experiment. And I think, on the whole, it's worthwhile. But it's a scary business.

 

[AgentPete]

It makes sense for Amazon... which is why they’re pushing it so hard, of course. Let’s not forget that the current Amazon/Hachette dispute is really all about pricing – who sets it, and at what level. Lots about this regularly on The Debriefer.

 

[Brian Clegg]

But it's certainly not as simple as 'evil Amazon wants to sell books cheaply.' My publisher seems to feel these deals are good too. And as I say, when they work, they really do get you visibility.

 

[AgentPete]

It’s conditioning consumers (or do I mean readers?) to expect a very low price point for ebooks. Remember, the product is so new that there is little consumer sense of inherent value in a download.

One could argue that consumers natively expect downloads basically to be free – how much are a few electrons “worth”? – and all-you-can-eat subscription models (Amazon Prime, Netflix) reinforce this.

Will Hachette succeed in maintaining a higher price point? In the long run, I doubt it (and I’m not just talking about their dispute with Amazon). Where the disparity is so large - 99p versus something ten or fifteen times greater – then no amount of added value – curation etc – will make it seem competitive.

Anyhow, I’m seeing some Hachette folk this evening, will be interesting to pick up their mood...

 

[Frances Gow]

Interesting debate. Who holds the ultimate decision about pricing; the publisher, the agent or the author?

 

[Frances Gow]

Okay, so duh! It's the retailer…

 

[Brian Clegg]

I'd say the retailer and the publisher - I don't think Amazon puts books in these sales without the publisher's consent.

 

[AgentPete]

That is, in fact, one of the key issues at stake now. You may have heard about the “Agency Model”. This is nothing to do with literary agents: rather, it’s all about defining the exact legal relationship between buyer, retailer (e.g. Amazon) and publisher. If the retailer is merely the agent of the publisher, then the publisher can set the price point. A very, very big deal at the moment. We cover it regularly on The Debriefer.

 

[Frances Gow]

Thanks, Pete. I need to download the Debriefer and catch up.

 

[Richard Sutton]

Me, too. It's a real stink-storm over here with all the Hachette authors doing the fancy dance to complain about Amazon;s practices... However, Brian, I ran my own on sale when first launched at 99 cents to discover that the price point invites a very non-selective kind of reader, which wouldn't matter except they often leave really weird reviews. I kept my titles at $2.99 for a couple of years, then moved them up to $4.99 to find they sold a bit better at the higher price. Of course, my royalty checks are tiny but they're getting bigger at least!

 

[AliG]

I think I'd sacrifice profit in the short run for visibility, so I'd potentially be in favour of limited periods of 99p book. But maybe not 99 cents- too cheap...

Perhaps we should start a Weird Reviews thread- probably plenty of meat for that among the published.

 

[Carol Rose]

Amazon had my first Racy Nights book (published in March of 2013) at 99 cents for about a month. I saw a spike in sales, mostly for that book, but it was transient. And of course I barely made any royalties off that price point. Siren discounted one of my Carolyn Rosewood books to 99 cents for about six weeks earlier this year. Again, I saw a quick spike in sales, but only for that book. 99 cents is a "bargain" to readers, but we don't end up with much of a return on that price. It does spark interest in the other books, but I'm not sure how much.

 

[Brian Clegg]

One rueful observation - the 99p tactical visibility is very time sensitive. I had one at 99p last month, it got into the top 700 and stayed there the whole month. I have one this month which again got into the top 700 in a couple of days. Then the distributor made a cock-up and it was unavailable for 2 days. It dropped to about 2,000 and hasn't recovered in 10 days.

 

[Carol Rose]

One rueful observation - the 99p tactical visibility is very time sensitive. I had one at 99p last month, it got into the top 700 and stayed there the whole month. I have one this month which again got into the top 700 in a couple of days. Then the distributor made a cock-up and it was unavailable for 2 days. It dropped to about 2,000 and hasn't recovered in 10 days.

That's interesting, Brian. Almost as if readers are searching for bargains and when they don't see one, they simply move on. Disheartening.

 

[Brian Clegg]

That's interesting, Brian. Almost as if readers are searching for bargains and when they don't see one, they simply move on. Disheartening.

It's not so much that as that being around the 700 mark on Kindle means that you are in the top five or so of sections like Popular Science, so it makes the book a lot more visible. At it's current ranking of 2345, it's not in the top 20 in Popular Science, so much less likely to be seen.

 

[Carol Rose]

It's not so much that as that being around the 700 mark on Kindle means that you are in the top five or so of sections like Popular Science, so it makes the book a lot more visible. At it's current ranking of 2345, it's not in the top 20 in Popular Science, so much less likely to be seen.

Amazon rankings are such a mystery to me, still. Thank you for the explanation.

 

[flootzavut]

With my consumer hat on: I do know that I've taken a punt on a lower priced book now and then, only to go on to buy other books of theirs at a higher price without flinching. I don't have a lot of spare money, and I know there are a good few authors who I may never have discovered if their books hadn't appeared in a sale. Pre Kindle, buying a book for £5 or £6 or £7 (or more) wasn't something I did a lot because I simply couldn't afford it, and when I did buy, it was usually something I was already sure I'd like. With treebooks, there's also the difficulty of returning a book, which, if something turns out to be godawful, is very easy on Kindle. I have taken a couple of risks with ebook spending that I wouldn't have taken with a physical book unless I was actually in a bricks and mortar bookstore, which given the state of my health generally means I wouldn't take the risk cause I just don't get to book shops much. I don't use the return facility a lot, but just knowing it's there is reassuring when the budget is limited.

One of the first sales after I got my Kindle included a book called "How to teach quantum physics to your dog" - intriguing title, but it was being able to download the sample to my non backlit screen that made me decide to buy it (I loathe reading at any kind of length on a backlit screen), and I went on to spend I think the best part of £6 on Chad Orzel's follow up on relativity because the quantum physics book was so good.

I don't remember titles off the top of my head, but I know I've ended up buying several trilogies where I got the first book for cheap (sometimes even for free) and then gone on to buy books two and three at a much higher price. Obviously more money would've been earned if I'd bought all three books at full price... but there's no guarantee I would have discovered them at all if I hadn't bought the initial book cheap.

I strongly suspect it doesn't always, or even often, work that way, and I'm not wild at all about Amazon's efforts to convince people that 99p is the price we should expect to pay for a book, so I'm not arguing that what they're doing is okay and that loss leaders are the way forward, but otoh it can certainly work.

I guess it's often a luck and timing issue whether a cut price actually leads to ongoing benefit