Kristin J. Tsetsi did a fun rant and used some math on the costs of e-books on Kindle. Worth a read just for the different perspective and another way to look at value.
http://kristenjtsetsi.com/2011/10/28/the-cost-of-kindle-books-pay-up-or-shut-up/
Dean’s Short Bio
Bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith published traditionally more than one hundred popular novels and well over two hundred short stories. His novels include the science fiction novel Laying the Music to Rest and the thriller The Hunted as D.W. Smith. With Kristine Kathryn Rusch, he co-wrote The Tenth Planet trilogy and The 10th Kingdom. He writes under many pen names and ghosts for a number of top bestselling writers.
Dean wrote books and comics for all three major comic book companies, Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, and wrote scripts for Hollywood. One movie actually saw film.
Dean also worked as an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books. He now plays a role as an executive editor for Fiction River.
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WMG Publishing Inc. is now my major publisher of all my coming novels, collections, and short stories.
Fiction River Volumes #1and #2 Are Available!
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Hi Dean, if you check the article, the blogger has removed the offending song lyrics, so I guess you are free to repost it.
Thanks, Thomas, the link is back up now. She’s very smart. Just a brain glitch that we all have at times. I read right over it the first time myself and didn’t catch it, to be honest. Took me an hour to snap out of it and go “Wait…”
So she has fixed the problem and the post is a fun perspective at pricing.
I’ve said it before. Books are not commodities.
I do think the one thing that Kristin misses, though (perhaps because of the discussion she is responding to) is that most of the readers who don’t like high prices simply can’t afford to buy many books at high prices. It isn’t how they value a book, or how they judge an author, or a matter of what other authors charge.
That’s not the author’s problem, of course, (unless it happens to be your prime demographic). But arguing with the customer’s pocket book makes no sense. The money that is there is what is there. And the customer is going to do what the customer is going to do.
The people to rant at are the writers and publishers who get all tied up in worrying about it.
IMHO, the best pricing strategy right now is a flexible one. Set a proper list price — whatever gives you the best overall return — and then have a sale once in a while to catch the rest of the audience.
I agree, Camille. That’s why I feel the $4.99 or $5.99 price for novels is the best because it leaves lots of room for sales and allows book card sales in stores of electronic books.
Dean, thank you for the principled stand on copyrights. It saddens me when the average person doesn’t respect copyrights; but it outright astounds me how many creative people I’ve seen who expect to get paid for their work but see nothing wrong with ignoring the copyrights of other creators.
Agree, Martin, but we all make mistakes and this was just a mistake in the heat of writing an interesting blog. She yanked it down the moment I pointed it out to her. Mistakes happen, but what I hate is writers who claim to want to be professionals, or who are professionals, and have never bothered to learn copyright in the slightest. I see that all the time with the question: “How do I copyright my work?” Sigh…. That question is so wrong in so many ways, all I can say to anyone who asks it is “Get THE COPYRIGHT HANDBOOK.”
I’m just about convinced to go up to 4.99 or even 5.99 for my mysteries. (I’m at 3.99 now.) Price is a part of the message, and 5.99 looks more like a mystery right now. (However, as a reader, I find $4 – that is #3.99 – is my resistance point — and I know my imagined demographic tends toward used books. Not because of price but because they, like me, prefer classics to current.)
I’m going to have a sale in November, and maybe I’ll change the price when I go back up.
I’m not _worried_ about it, though, because I don’t have enough books out there for it to matter right now.
This is such a tired subject my eyes could roll out of my head. I can understand those ebook that run at 12.99 and 14.99 and in some cases 16.99. Yes, that can be ridiculous at the higher price points, but there is still a lot that goes into the creation of a book besides the friggin printer!
Do people really not realize the time and effort that goes into producing a book? Its not just skipping along the meadow and writing down a couple words here and there. Some people will never be satisfied, and anyone who won’t pay more than 3.99 (lets call it what it is here, 4 bucks) for a book, not matter what, that’s a person who goes to bargain bins and used bookstores to begin with. To expect a traditionally published book that runs at lets say, 1000 pages, or even 500 pages, for four dollars! The entitlement mentality has to stop and people have to stop being so selfish. I’m glad to be able to price my books at 4.99, but its not a luxury traditionally published books have, what with overhead and all. Everyone wants to be paid, but so many don’t want to pay.
People should price their books at whatever price they want and not worry if it’s too high or too low. No matter what any individual writer does there are going to be $12.99 ebooks and $0.99 ebooks.
Low priced ebooks are not going away. Neither are high priced ones.
I don’t see that there’s much point in writers trying to convince other writers to price a certain way.
Do people really not realize the time and effort that goes into producing a book?
Mmm, the good old labour theory of value.
People don’t care about costs of production, they care about what something is worth to them. If your book is worth $2.99 to me and your costs are $29.99 then you’re not going to sell it to me at that price.
I looked at my Amazon wishlist yesterday to see whether there were any books on there that I should buy as e-books. Almost all of the trade-published e-books were $9.99 or more and all of them had DRM which makes the book even less valuable to me.
So I bought a new self-published indie book from an author whose previous book I liked for $0.99 instead, when I would happily have paid $5 for a DRM-free copy of any of the books on my wishlist.
The real ‘entitlement mentality’ comes from industries that have been protected by law and technology for decades and now see themselves faced with real competition for the first time. In most other industries there’s a perpetual demand for lower costs and increased value so they can reduce prices and sell more; when I worked for a company making add-in boards for PCs people spent weeks hunting down new suppliers who could save a few cents on component costs because that more than paid for their salary when the savings were applied across millions of cards, and if we could accumulate a few dollars in savings the difference in sales between a board priced at $99 vs $110 was substantial.
The fundamental point is made I suppose, but the song comparison doesn’t work at all for me as presented. It entirely discounts that music is the driving creative force of most songs (you could argue rap to some extent) and creation of that music is often a creative act that can take many many hours, and cost a lot to record depending on your studio needs.
Also, songs tend to be listened to over and over dozens or even hundreds of times. While a prized book might be reread a few times, most books are considered a one use experience. So, like video games “replayability” is a factor in the value proposition.
Almost no one would pay the lyrics alone because half the people don’t even know them for songs they like–they just like the music and the tone of the lyrics.
So, yeah, the cost comparison was probably just a bit of fun, but it’s a bankrupt comparison. But maybe thinking about the example for 2 seconds was 2 seconds too long.
Interesting discussion. I pretty much stay with the following e-book pricing scale:
.99 for short stories
2.99 for short novels (15K – 40k) and anthologies
4.99 for novels (40K+)
I see no need right now to go over 4.99 (though I do think 5.99 is fair for novels 120k +)
I think books have always been cheaper per word than music if you calculate the cost per word, but then books are a different medium and you tend to take longer to read them (depending on your reading speed, of course). And what about comic books or graphic novels? Do you pay per panel or per word or a combination of both?
I agree with J. Tanner, books are not something you will read over and over and over each day. I know people who play a song over and over until they literally wear the vinyl out (sorry, for the pre-digital reference. It’s an age thing. *grin*)
So for some people they will listen to the song far more times than they will read a book. I’m not a math person so you’ll have to figure the cost per word for this out on your own.
Fun discussion which I’m sure will be going on for years to come.
The comparison game is silly to play anyway. I can rent a movie that cost $80M to make for $0.99 at Redbox.
Anyway, value is entirely subjective — I value Harlequin Romances at a zero price because I have no desire to read them — but what really matters isn’t the price but the earnings. Figure out the price that is going to result in the best earnings for your books.
sorry, Dean. I listen to songs many times (50 in first year of publication). Books — almost never than one read.
comparison is absurd.
Chuck, I didn’t say it was logical, only fun. And I love poking at this pricing thing any way I can. (grin)
Plus, Chuck, you are missing Kristin’s main point about authors valueing their work. That has been a major point of mine as well in many posts.
Mark: agreed about writers being able to set their prices however they like.
I wanted to clarify that when I said that “The people to rant at are the writers” I did not mean that they should be criticized for setting low, or high, prices. Rather that, if you’re going to rant at somebody, rant at writers for believing that you have to do one thing or another because the interwebs say so (and if you don’t, thousands of puppies will die screaming horrible deaths).
Dean – YES. That’s all it was meant to be – fun, and about the value of the writers’ work. (And, okay, a reaction to indie publishers being called “greedy” for asking anything more than $3.99 for their work.)
BTW (if anyone is still reading this comment thread) I was noodling about prices on my blog, and I decided to try something:
I’m going to raise my prices past what even Dean recommends — to the 6.99 I see on most commercial mysteries on Amazon — for a few months. ($2.99 for the screenplay and novella, shortest stuff still at 99 cents.)
However, I’m going to start with a 99 cent sale on the two key novels for a couple of weeks starting on Thanksgiving, and I’ll end with another sale (maybe at 2.99 or something) in March.
I hope to release another novel before the end of that sale (which will be at full price until the March sale).
I think that Kristen has gotten the whole point wrong. Mind you, I’m not sure there is a right answer.
A family friend is an artist. She does runs of 10-100 prints of a drawing, and sets her prices based on:
1) Number of copies made
2) Genre
3) Her evaluation of how good the work is
Items 2 & 3 are both judgment calls (and if you disagree about 2, go to a science fiction convention and listen to the arguments about what genre).
So pricing for her is very much a guess. Sometimes something wont sell, so she’ll drop the price, and then it moves.
Pricing is a black art. Joe Konrath said $2.99 was the price he found that made him the most money. He did a lot of experimenting with his prices (go read his blog about it).
Dean thinks $4.99 is better for a novel. I assume Dean did some testing to come to that pricing.
But what everyone is ignoring is Amazon. Amazon pays 70% on price between $2.99 and $9.99. This means that pricing your ebook at 10.00 or higher is a bad move, unless you are willing to price your book at $23.34 or higher.
If you think I’m crazy, get your calculator out and check.
9.99 at 70% royalty = $6.993
23.34 at 30% royalty = $7.002
So Amazon has effectively put an upper price limit on you, unless you are willing to go really high on price.
Wayne
http://madhatter.ca
Also remember that Amazon has done TONS of research. They didn’t pull those numbers out of a hat. The 2.99 to 9.99 range is where the real profit is for everyone.
Camille,
Yep. That’s the range they think readers are willing to lay down their cash for Ebooks. And I think they are right. I do buy the odd Ebook for more than $9.99 (David Weber, Terry Pratchett, P. C. Hodgell, Tanya Huff, and a couple of other writers are worth paying the price for), but not very many.
Wayne