- $.99 remains popular, but shows a big drop compared to their 2012 study.
- $.99 to $1.99 underperforms in terms of earnings. (Per Coker, $1.99 is “a black hole.”)
- $2.99 is the most common price point with indies.
- $2.99 to $6.99 is the sweet spot for maximum earnings.
- Indies have virtually abandoned the $9.99 price point compared to 2012’s study.
by
Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
It’s been a very long time since I’ve
sold anything at 99 cents. I’d read
some blog posts that advised against it.
I’d heard readers say that it was tough finding anything good at 99
cents.
Then I started reading those same
things…but it was now arguing against a $1.99 price point. The best, most recent
examination I’ve got on the subject is this post by writer Molly Greene: “Ebook Pricing: What’s The
Perfect Number?”
The entire post is
worth a read. Here is an excerpt where
Molly quotes Smashwords CEO and
founder Mark Coker on
various price points:
Per Coker, “I see untapped opportunity [at the $3.99
price point], where indies may be able to raise prices but not suffer unit
decline.” He concludes “some authors are underpricing.” Smashwords data also
reveals …
I totally agree about the problems
surrounding the $1.99 pricing. I may
have listed a book at that price once, briefly, but I yanked it out of there
quickly.
Personally, I’ve found that keeping one
of my books free is helpful. I
currently have the two most recently self-published books at $3.99, where they
tend to still sell well, and an older title at $2.99. (And yes, one of my books is currently free,
as usual.)
I can’t really even remember the last
time I ran a book at $.99, which must mean it was a couple of years ago. Since I have a book for free, I didn’t
really see the point of running another book so low.
But I decided I’d run a very, very short
99 cent experiment. It was, actually,
fewer than 24 hours long. I figured January was always a nice time to have a
small spike of income (January being the month I’d receive income from
November sales). If there was a spike. Sales have been steady for me this fall and
I’ve not really seen that slump I’ve been hearing about, so I decided to give
it a go and run it for my latest title.
The nice
thing, though, about running a 99 cent sale is that you have a degree of
control over the start and end of the sale.
When I make a book free, for instance, I’m listing it as free on
Smashwords, then allowing Amazon to price match that price. Sometimes, it takes days for Amazon to catch
on. Then, when I’m ready to shift the
free sale to another book, I raise the price on Smashwords. Sometimes it takes the various retailers
days to get the message to raise the price (Sony, I’m looking at you). So Amazon continues to match the free price
while it’s still getting the message that some retailer out there continues to
list it at $0. I don’t have complete
control over the start and stop of that promotion.
For a $.99 sale, I just click over
to my book’s Kindle Direct Publishing bookshelf and adjust the price to
$.99. Amazon has a pop-up window with a
disclaimer that it may take as many as twelve hours for the change to take
effect. It only took a couple of
hours.
I ran the sale on a newer title and
watched as it cracked the top 2,000 of the Amazon bestseller list—before the
sale, it was bouncing between the top 8,000—12,000. Then I went back into the bookshelf and
raised the price to $3.99 again.
“Bait and switch?” asked my husband,
eyebrows raised and trying to figure out what I'd done, when I told him that the books were selling like hotcakes at
$3.99.
“Not a bit. I didn’t falsely advertise one
price and make the reader pay a higher one. I just paid for brief visibility.”
And that’s what it feels like to me—that
I’ve sacrificed income for visibility.
And the sales for the other titles also increased.
This sale occurred on Friday night
through Saturday afternoon. Writing
this on Sunday afternoon, the book is still in the top 4,000. This type of thing is clearly good for a spike in sales instead of a long-term
strategy. Regardless, I’m sure I’ll be
glad to get the proceeds when the Christmas bills arrive in January. :)
Now, of course, this won’t work out as well for everyone. And not everyone
will want to list a book that they’ve invested a lot of time and energy in at
$.99, even temporarily. But for someone
who might have several self-published books out (I have four right now) and
who wants the ability to control the dates of a sale—this might be a good
experiment to try.
Have you experimented with the price
points for your books? What is your
comfort zone, in terms of pricing?
Image: MorgueFile: imelenchon