eBook Pricing Emerges As The Leading Self-Publishing Question As Publishers Try To 'Read' Their Fans

Aug. 22, 2011 - PRLog -- A.V. Harrison Publishing staff recently interviewed Emily Hill, author of “All Smart Cookies Can Self Publish!” on the topic of eBook pricing.  We would like to share that interview with you.

Visit http://www.amazon.com/Self-Publish-Mid-Year-Independent-Publishing-ebook/dp/B004GXAYO4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314025319&sr=1-1 for details on how to self-publish.

Ms. Hill took the lead in the interview, “eBook pricing has been the topic of leading blogs for the past month.  And, I was contacted by Lynnette Phillips, book marketer, a couple of days ago to chat about ‘book pricing’.  We had an interesting discussion, and I’d like to hit on the high points of what I shared with Lynnette and her client on how eBooks are priced.

Fiction:
eBook pricing for fiction is coming down to (1) market demand; (2) the author's 'emotional comfort zone' and (3) 'trial and error'.  The fiction market - except for the insatiable paranormal/action stories - is totally and completely glutted.  Soaked.  That includes romance, westerns, YA, and historical fiction.  Good writing, impeccable grammar and sentence structure, a unique story, and sharp marketing garner sales.
Looking back over the past two years, as the economy cooled, book sales waned and book stores closed. Ultimately writers discovered a way to make an income in the eBook industry.  Authors – good and bad – have flooded the market.  So readers now do the job of ‘scoring’ good and bad fiction – the job that used to belong to agents.

So how do ambitious, new writers get the attention of a global marketplace when there is so much selection out there’?  Like Boyd Morrison [The Ark, Touchstone, 2010] a lot of them give away their fiction on initial release.  And, I mean literally and on a large scale – free!  

As an exercise this morning I surveyed the pricing of Kindle Top 10 fiction sellers (not free books).  Here is the line-up:

$ 09.99  The Help, Berkeley, Legacy (Big 6) Publisher
$ 00.99  Caribbean Moon, Rick Murgittroyd, IndiePub
$04.49  Hunger Games, Scholastic, Legacy (Big 6) Publisher
$12.99  Now You See Her, Brown, Little & Company, Legacy (Big 6) Publisher
$11.99  A Stolen Life, Simon & Schuster, Legacy (Big 6) Publisher
$07.99  Catching Fire, Scholastic, Legacy (Big 6) Publisher
$07.14  Mocking Jay, Scholastic, Legacy (Big 6) Publisher
$00.99  Stealing Faces, IndiePub
$02.99  Deceitful Moon, Rick Murgittroyd, IndiePub
$02.99  A Small Fortune, IndiePub

One notes that the average price of Big Six (Legacy Publishers) is $9.09.  However, Legacy Publishers have been hit with a backlash for their predatory pricing in recent months.  Hachette’s Brown, Little & Company was hit with a meteor storm of one*-star reviews on their Mike Connelly titles in May.  On contrast, pricing for the IndiePubs in the Top 10 fiction category is either $.099 or $02.99.  

Not conclusive enough, so I turned to the people I have selected as mentors for my own publishing efforts; starting with Dean Wesley Smith who advises $2.99 for short novels, $4.99 for a short story collection, and $4.99 for standard length novels.  Smith discounts those in the discount publishing business; i.e. those who ‘sell’ for free.  I am so onboard with every piece of advice Smith has ever given. Another wildly successful IndieAuthor, JA Konrath, hired an eStributor this summer.  An eStributor collects 15% for eDistribution of Konrath's titles.  Konrath writes frequently on the topic of pricing.  Tony Elridge, writing for BookBuzzr suggests pricing eBooks at $2.99 and discusses ‘book bundling’ as a way to sell sets of titles at a higher price.

Nathan Bransford points out the obvious economics of eBook pricing and attracting readers in his blog on the topic of pricing.  He observes that when presented with two titles, in the reader’s preferred genre, a reader will hit ‘Buy Now!’ on the cheaper title even if that title has been written by a lesser known author or even an unknown author, or a "bad" writer. Bransford also notes that the price of eBooks have dropped dramatically over the period June 2010 - June 2011.

This brings me to John Locke.  He claims he’s not the best writer, but notes to his readers that he’s selling millions of books (so, readers seem to disagree with his self-assessment).  His eBook fiction titles all sell for $0.99.  

His non-fiction, ‘How I Sold 1 Million Books In Five Months’, is going for $4.99.  So let’s move over to that category of pricing.

Non-fiction eBook Pricing
‘Sex Sells’ in the non-fiction category, whereas ‘Crime Sells’ when it comes to fiction – or so it seems.  One author holds all six positions in the Top Kindle 100 non-fiction category with ‘My Lustful Life and Loves’, publisher Erotic Evolution, with pricing between $2.99 and $6.99.

Erotic Evolution is followed by a series of how-to guides.  The most expensive non-fiction title in the Top Kindle ranking is selling for $7.00.

Want My Opinion On Pricing?
Authors who give away their eBooks and then loudly tout their ratings are frauds, in my opinion.  They either lack confidence in their work, don't want to devise a marketing plan, or haven't made friends with their fan base.  If you are doing commercial writing [writing to make money], the reality is that you should be writing to your fan base and what they want to read.  I say this with emphasis.

Here’s what I’m going to do.  I’m holding my fiction at $3.99; I’m lowering [non-fiction] ‘Mexico On A Motorcycle: Riding Out The Recession’ to $6.99; I’m upping my ‘All Smart Cookies Can Self-Publish’ to $3.95.  How about you? What are you doing about pricing - and marketing - your titles? Visit info@avharrison-publishing.com for details that you’d like to share with me.

The Best Way To Sell Books?  
Competitively Price The Best Book You Can Possibly Write – Grammar and Punctuation Perfect.  And Then Market It To The Fan Base That You Have Already Established.

I attended a Steve Berry/Jim Rollins writer's workshop this past month.  To their credit these two exciting veteran authors support the 'History Matters Foundation'.  The revenue generated from the Seattle workshop added to the $75,000 dollars that Berry and his Foundation have contributed to history museums across the nation.  In closing his remarks Berry stated the mantra of seasoned authors:  "Write the best damned novel that you possibly can.  Edit it, re-write it; and then start over and re-write it again".  To that I add, "Do your marketing!"  A book that you upload but do not market is like a child left standing on the corner of 5th and Main.  

Visit http://www.amazon.com/Promoting-Your-Titles-Management-eb... for details

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A.V. Harrison Publishing features ground-breaking topics from emerging authors. Its books are distributed by Ingram, available on Amazon.com and B&N Nook. Owner, Emily Hill, invites submissions and can be contacted at info@avharrison-publishing.com.