How should you price your ebook?
This is an interesting question for readers. Their only vote in the matter is with their purchases. So, let’s analyze that first. Readers rule. They tend to reward the known more than the unknown, though. When readers (and I’m one, so this applies to me) get comfortable with an author, they’ll pay a higher price, but only up to a certain point. When we’re trying out a new author, we want to be rewarded for trying someone new.
That’s human nature and probably explains why authors and publishers make special offers. In the case of some indies, in fact, giveaways. If an author has a series s/he wants to get readers hooked on, s/he sells it at a very low price or gives it away. The idea is that when I read the first book in a series and like it, I’m supposed to extrapolate and assume all the other books in the series are good too? That’s a big assumption especially if preceded by the assumption that any book in the series should be readable independently from the others (a correct assumption). Moreover, we might see the Hollywood sequel phenomenon: sequels, whether books or movies, can become “more of the same”–formulaic is the word used for books.
Readers have come to expect freebies and greatly reduced prices, especially from indie writers. It’s probably non-productive whining to say that we’re killing the goose that laid the golden egg. I’m not helping you at all when I download your free book or sale-priced book. It doesn’t improve your name recognition in my case—I read so many books that I often download one and start it only to realize I’ve already read it (don’t ask me why this gets by Amazon). At best, during the download I’m thinking the author is stupid in giving away her or his hard work.
It’s also non-productive whining to say that readers are spoiled by the giveaways and reduced prices. They’ve come to expect them and don’t seem to put any value on an author’s hard work. But let’s be realistic: Let’s assume that the typical ebook can sell N copies (N is pretty low if you believe Amazon). Maybe Amazon doesn’t count freebies in totaling up N, but I do—we’re actually talking about numbers of readers. If the author gets N free downloads, that might be all s/he is getting, especially if s/he normally sells the ebook for $4.99 and returns to that price.
I’ll propose a different tactic. It hasn’t worked for me, but it’s different (FYI: the above tactic hasn’t worked either). I value my work. I’d rather put ALL my ebooks at a fair price (it’s often the “sales price” of other authors) and let the chips fall where they may. I’m pretty sure that the person who downloads it has put some thought into her or his purchase. My idea is that smart buyers are also smart readers. They want to stimulate their intelligence, not numb it. Yes, they want to be entertained, but not in a trivial way by reading fluff. I don’t write fluff. Never have, ever since my first novel written during the summer I turned thirteen (OK, it was a bit raunchy, but it wasn’t fluff).
Of course, this tactic still doesn’t resolve the question of the title. If you’re traditionally published, you have no choice—your publisher controls all pricing. His answer tends to be prejudicial for you. While publishers settled with the DoJ and Apple got their hands slapped over Steve Jobs’s “agency model,” Amazon has let them set their prices anyway, caving to the agency model. The result is that you will see ebook prices that are almost as much or more than paper books. Believe me, people think more than twice about downloading an ebook that costs $12.99 or more, especially when the paper version only costs $14.99. (Why traditional publishers are so stupid they do this is beyond me.)
Indie writers are more in control. It’s clear that they can easily price their ebook for less than $10, thus undercutting traditionally published ebooks, but that just sets a ceiling. Sales stats are mostly anecdotal, but I would venture that $5 is a better ceiling, for both indies and traditionally published. I certainly won’t buy an ebook that costs more than $5 now, no matter who writes it or publishes it. I have many friends who think the same way.
Because I’ll download a freebie if it looks interesting (if an author wants to be stupid and make that offer, I’d be stupid not to take advantage of it), the minimum is clearly $0. Weir’s The Martian went even farther, getting its start with a free PDF downloadable from his website, which is also zero production cost. That was The Martian. Things will only get worse if every author tries that. No, my tactic says to find a price between $0 and $5 and stick with it.
Note that I’m NOT saying to total your ebook production costs and divide it by the number of books you expect to sell to get the price–that “solution” is simplistic. Imagine a graph of the number of units sold v. price instead. In a run of three months, say, that curve has to have a max somewhere, the optimum price point. I don’t care how many units you sell, that will happen. That max might occur at $0, of course, or even $5 (for calculus aficionados, it’s a function on a closed interval, albeit integer-sampled). In the first case, your readers will only read your ebook if it’s free, which probably says more about them than about you (i.e., they’re cheap). In the second case, maybe you could even increase the price a little, but that’s dangerous.
Of course, you don’t have that curve. You can’t even generate it. It’s like the “Many World of Quantum Mechanics.” You need parallel histories. In a number of them, you set the price at $0, $0.50, and so forth and watch what happens to get the curve. Because we don’t have a lot of identical histories to play with, can we predict the curve? There are ways. I’ve informally done this; so have many others. The way you do it is to examine similar books on Amazon and draw the curve from your samples. There are many assumptions that go into that calculation, one being that your determination of those “similar books,” those comps, is valid, but it gives a result.
My short foray into this sampling method produced a price point around $3. Others have come up with a similar answer. Ideally, I would apply this to my own extensive catalog, maybe separating the more sci-fi-like books from the mysteries and thrillers, assuming the ebooks in each category are similar (again, an assumption I’m not sure about, even though I wrote them!). For now, my ebooks are at $2.99 and $3.99 save one. I’m standing by those prices for a while. They’re fair and competitive.
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Fans of hard sci-fi, dystopia, and post-apocalyptic novels should try the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” Earth suffers through the Chaos in Survivors of the Chaos and Humans arrive at a new colony on New Haven, a planet orbiting the star 82 Eridani. On that planet and other new colonies, the saga continues in Sing a Samba Galactica, where first contact takes on a new meaning with friendly ETs, the new coalition must fight against not-so-friendly ETs, and ETs and Humans strive to do the right thing when confronted with a huge collective intelligence, the Swarm. In the third novel, Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!, humanity almost loses the battle with a megalomaniac when the conditions that started the Chaos threaten to return. Available in all ebook formats.
In libris libertas….
