Wow, it’s interesting to get some real numbers out of indie publishers. Robin Sullivan does a nice job with this post and the comments afterward are interesting as well as others chip in to put their sales up. Very much worth the read, folks.
http://publishingperspectives.com/2011/06/self-published-ebook-authors-earn-living/
On the one chart there is no telling about pricing. Just numbers of sales. And also no way of knowing how many products each author has up.
I will admit Kris and I are over the minimum 800 sales on only Kindle per month. (And I will not say how much over.) And we sell short stories (99 cents), collections ($2.99 and $4.99), and novels ($4.99). And yes, the money is nice and growing. We also sell under seven names and across all genres.
And we are having overseas and Hollywood people find our work far more easily than when we were only traditionally published and had agents, so we are making more that way as well.
The big sales folks like Locke and Konrath, as Robin says, get all the press, but those of us just doing the publishing and making decent sales are making decent money as well.
What do I think the key is? Simple: Have a bunch of products up there. The more up, the more readers can find your work, find something they like, and then buy more.
And value your work. Always remember a book sold at $4.99 is equal to 10 books sold at 99 cents.
I want the reader who values my work as much as I do. But that seems to be just my opinion these days. The terms “writer” and “self-worth” do not often go in the same sentence.
(Yup, that’s just me being snarfy… (grin))
Wow. I never really thought of myself that way, but … I’m a mid-lister. Which is fine with me. Never thought I’d make it that far.
“I want the reader who values my work as much as I do. But that seems to be just my opinion these days. The terms “writer” and “self-worth” do not often go in the same sentence.
“(Yup, that’s just me being snarfy… (grin))”
Price does not equal value. Value is intrinsic and price is usually the result of market forces.
I really don’t think a writer who prices low values his book less. I think it’s a business decision. Price is a marketing tool at times. Free is a great price because it can help a book zoom up the sales rank and when it reverts back to its normal price at a higher ranking, it can mean increased revenue.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Amazon is now pushing a bunch of romance and SF titles at $0.99, many from the trade press. It’s a price point that’s here to stay and there’s a market segment that loves it. I bet more and more readers will warm up to it — why not? A book for a dollar is a nice deal.
To everyone but the writer. If all I could do was sell my novels for 99 cents, I’d stick with all the problems of traditional publishers. At least they pay me a working wage even though I am only a midlist writer.
Sorry, Mark, we are going to have to agree to disagree. Sure, price is a factor, but when someone tells me they “sold” a thousand copies of their book by giving it away free, I just snort. I can give away my stories on a street corner too. Just like people shove those porno flyers into your hands when you are walking on the Strip in Vegas.
So no issue if other writers want to stand on street corners. And a few will get lucky and become million sellers. Great for them. They told great stories.
People are forgetting in this crazy new world that it is stories that sell. Not price. Locke told some great stories. Too bad he undervalued his own work. He might actually be a millionaire with those quality stories.
The only way that selling a book for $.99 is a good idea for a non-household name writer, in my (so far) humble opinion, is as a specific and temporary marketing tactic for promotional reasons… to gain visibility and name (brand) recognition and increase readership by appealing to readers who would consider an impulse buy.
There is a long-term danger in valuing an entire novel at $.99. If that becomes the standard price, it’s going to be a great deal more difficult for writers to make a decent living.
Locke has sold a million ebooks at $0.99 and made $350,000 in the last few months. If he’d priced those books at $2.99, he’d probably have sold 10,000 copies total and made $20,000.
Have you considered that maybe the reason you don’t sell in Locke’s or even Konrath’s volume is that your books are overpriced relative to what people are willing to pay?
I’ve been following this stuff for a long time, and from what I’ve been able to sort out, the optimum strategy for most mystery/thriller novelists with a reasonable number of titles is to price their full-length backlist at $0.99 each and their latest at $2.99. Each time they publish a new title, they should price it at $2.99 and drop the former $2.99 title to $0.99.
I think the secret is to make buying your whole backlist a no-brainer. I’ll buy a new full-length Konrath at $2.99, and I’ll buy any of his backlist at $0.99, but that’s as high as I go. I wouldn’t buy short stories or novellas unless they’re in a collection of similar length at those prices.
Incidentally, I’ve never read any of your or Kris’s work, and I don’t plan to buy any until and if you price them at those levels. If I like the first one in a series, I’ll buy the rest. I think there are an awful lot of readers like me. There’s too much good stuff out there at those prices to make it worth paying more.
I really think you’re leaving money on the table, Dean.
Robert,
Well, have fun. And trust me, I’ll sneer as much as I want at the 35 cent profit on a novel. I find it silly and shows that authors have no belief in their own work. I make that on short fiction, but on a novel, not happening in my lifetime. (Guess you are never reading any of my books, huh?)
Guess I’ve just been in traditional publishing too long where my books sell at normal prices (and my pen names books that no one here know about) sell just fine and in pretty good numbers at $6.99-$9.99 electronic.
I value my work and trust me, if I had been Locke and did something silly and reduced my price to 99 cents and sold a million copies, I would be kicking myself every day for all the money I lost doing something that silly.
And trust me, under this name (Dean Wesley Smith) I only have up some short fiction at 99 cents and collections at $2.99 and not many of them are outselling my Star Trek novels still up under this name and selling for a ton more. In fact, I wish for a moment you 99 cent discounters were right and my short fiction and collections would overpower the more expensive Trek novels under this name and let my original work come to the front of the search engine. But alas, the more expensive books just keep getting more downloads and my 99 cent stories just can’t compete. And why is that? Because my 99 cent stories don’t have as much audience and more than likely aren’t as good as my Trek novels.
Nothing to do with price. Just type of story and readership of that type and quality of story-telling.
I’m starting to find this argument just funny, actually.
Here is what I am saying:
Have belief in your own work and don’t discount it.
And I have a bunch of new writers shouting at me that I am wrong. Wrong about what? Belief in your own work?
I’m not sure if you’re numbering me among those new writers, but I’ve been writing full-time and making a decent living at it for about 15 years now. Non-fiction rather than fiction, but still.
Incidentally, my publisher, O’Reilly, is among the few publishers that gets it. The book I’m writing for them now will be released under a Creative Commons license, which means it will be legally downloadable and sharable. That horrifies a lot of authors, but by making the book freely sharable we’ll sell more print copies. A lot more.
I agree with whoever posted earlier that this is a business decision. You don’t get to set the value of your work; you only get to set the price. The value of your work is what potential buyers think it’s worth to them. The lower the price you set, the more buyers will consider it worth your price. The optimum price is that at which the book produces the most revenue to you.
Your marginal cost is zero, so the true value of one of your books is simply the revenue per book times the number of books sold. If you can sell X number of copies at $5 with revenue of $3.50 per copy, the value of that title is $3.5X. If you can sell 100X copies at $0.99 with revenue of $0.35 per copy, the value of that title is $35X, or ten times as much.
Your Trek books are part of a huge franchise of more than 40 years standing, so it’s not surprising that they sell well. I’d guess that they’d sell equally well if you put my name or anyone else’s on the cover. In other words, people are buying the “Trek” part, not because you’re the author.
Robert, good luck on all that. I hope it works. And of course it’s Trek that’s selling more. That’s what I meant. I can’t get my books up over the more expensive Trek books even when I price mine at 99 cents.
@Dean
You don’t think length is a factor?
I wonder if people who are having some success with 99 cent short stories maybe aren’t as clear as they could be about the length up front and readers are being lured into an impulse buy without reading the sample that they initially think is much longer.
(Your stories are clearly marked as such, so I’m talking about others I’ve stumbled on in my research into this whole e-pub phenomena. Late to the party, I know.)
Sorry, but the suggestion that Locke would have dropped from 1 million to 10k in sales if he went from 99 cents to 2.99 is inane.
Obviously none of us are looking though a crystal ball or anything, but it just doesn’t add up.
Let’s all agree that even if they were free, Locke’s books would not have moved a million copies if they sucked beyond belief. If someone offers you a free shit sandwich, you don’t take it because it;s free. So Locke has good stories. Anyone who says $1 for a good book is about right but $3 is a rip off is having serious issues with reality.
$3 is just not too much money for a GOOD book. Neither is $5. If it is barely readable maybe you sucker a few people in with $1 price point, but you don’t rack up a million sales with mediocre, no matter the price. If you are good enough to sell 1 million books for a buck, you are good enough to sell 350k @ $3. In 6 months? Maybe not. But I guess it depends on whether or not you want a crockpot or a microwave for a career.
350k in pocket money for a million $1 books vs 500k+ for 250k books at $3? Not a tough choice. Can you guarantee the 250k sales figure at $3 – of course not. But I can assure you that you have a much better shot at 500k with a $3 book than a $1 a book discount deal.
Hell, I sell OTHER PEOPLE’S books at yard sales for 50 cents. I;m not selling mine for 35…
Don’t know if you saw this sir: http://www.crazy8press.com/
but it kind of reminds me of what you and your wife have talked about with authors starting to go into business for themselves. In a message board post, Mr. David talked about it saying (and I’m paraphrasing here) basically what you have said that ebooks are winning and there is no reason for a writer to give it the old College try. (Mr. David phrases it much better than I.)
(And for those that don’t know, Peter David is one of the best authors out there, not only of books but of comic books too- those things with words and pictures that are beautiful to read on a summer’s night.)