Zoe Winters broke her silence on talking about publishing and did a great post about pricing. Very clear and reasoned. Worth the read, folks.
Dean’s Short Bio
Bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith has written more than one hundred popular novels and well over two hundred published 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 is the coauthor of The Tenth Planet trilogy and The 10th Kingdom. He writes under many pen names and has also ghosted for a number of top bestselling writers.
Dean has also written books and comics for all three major comic book companies, Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, and has done scripts for Hollywood. One movie was actually made.
Over his career he has also been an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books. He is now an executive editor for Fiction River.
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Another pricing post without reference to discoverability/visibility. Pricing is easy. How to get noticed in a sea of books…that’s hard.
I agree, well written and worth the read…
…though I might quibble with one passage:
“If we lived in some free hippie love culture where money didn’t exist, sure, I would write for free, just to share my words and be thrilled doing it. I’m not “in it for the money”. I just “need the money” for it to be worth it in the world we live in for me to put so much effort into entertaining you.”
My quibble would be that it’s okay to be “in it for the money”, Zoe. Lots of beneficial goods and services come about because people are “in it for the money”. Money is not a toxin. It’s a medium to facilitate an exchange of value for value. It’s not inherently evil.
Besides, if we lived in “some free hippie love culture where money didn’t exist”, then “reading” might be the last thing on people’s “To Do” list!
Todd
http://www.toddtrumpet.com
I like Zoe’s take on the issue. This is a job and one where ‘The professional writer’ must expect to make money enough that they can live doing it – if that’s their goal. Pricing is essential to this.
However, one thing I will add from my perspective is that a writer must not aiming only to make a ‘living’, but a ‘retirement’ as well. When we are young, we don’t get the fact that we are going to live past our working life and, at least, 1/3 of our life is going to be spent without any income at all!
What does this mean for the writer now? Every dollar we earn has to have future value, now and later. Hence, the question for the full time writer is: Can I retire on .99c a book 10 years from now?
In answering that question, it’s important to consider whether even US$2.99 or US$9.99 is enough. If you have to price yourself out of the market to retire then its time to give up writing or work a lot harder.
Now, I bet most people would say royalties are forever, right? Good luck with that one, lol. The digital book industry will change, the paper book change, everything will change. What is to say that Amazon et al or even the e-books last the next 10 years? Sure, books have been around for like forever, but will the format we publish in be around forever? Will we adapt or fall by the wayside? Major questions if you ask me. AND major questions that will affect your, my and probably Dean’s incomes in the future, which affects our retirement funds as well.
If paper books couldn’t hold the line against e-books, what is to say that e-books can do any better against [insert magic new format here]? Thus, full circle, writers need to think retirement as well. Now is not enough.
(Sorry Dean. That was just what struck me when I read Zoe’s post. Where are people’s retirement plans?)
I totally agree with her on pricing. I would never price my work for 99c. price. If you want to make a living you have a charge a price that will allow that.
I also like the way she turned off her comments because she didn’t want her site to be a writer hangout. I get that. I want what she wants-readers.
I work hard to write the absolute best books I can. I am willing to bust my ass to give you a reading experience that makes you pay my price AND beg me for more. If I can’t do that, the fault is with me and I will just get better until you do beg for more. But what I won’t do is lower my prices. I would encourage other authors who wish to make a living at this to think very carefully about all this. Do you want fans or do you want one night stands?
The above, to me, is the absolute best part of her post. I want to get to the point where people beg me for more stories; of course, I don’t have a heck of a lot up as yet. But I’m working on it.
And the pricing? It’s why I’m following your suggestions, Dean, because they make sense to me. I’ve already got a mini-short story collection (2 stories, same universe) for 99 cents, have a novelette just about ready to go ($1.99), 3 novellas ($2.99 ea), and am working on my novel, the first in a series (at least $4.99, maybe $5.99).
Although Zoe is already there with living off her writing, I want to get there, too. I don’t want any one night stands.
Besides, who wants to try to make a living off the bargain bin?
Here’s all I know about pricing. If I sell 10 copies at $0.99 I make $3.50. If I sell one copy at $4.95 I make $3.46.
What does that tell me? Nothing at all, because I have no idea if I will sell 12 times as many copies at $0.99 or sell only three times as many copies.
We don’t know if John Locke would have made more if he had priced his books at $4.95. We don’t know if Amanda Hocking would have gotten her $2M+ deal with St. Martins if she had priced at $4.95.
We just don’t know.
I find the whole pricing discussion a bit tiring. I don’t know why anyone cares to continually rehash it. I don’t know why Zoe felt like raising the issue again unless she’s been getting complaints about the price of her ebooks. Because really, who cares what Zoe prices at and who cares what John Locke prices at?
Why should I care if writers want to sign up with Select and give their books away for five days? Does any of this have any impact on me?
Bottom line as I see it is if Amazon and the others allow pricing as low as $0.99 and allow books to be selectively priced as free, we will have plenty of $0.99 books and plenty of free books. No amount of discussion is going to change that.
Also, another point on top of the retirement issue, is that writers need to consider tax responsibilities long-term. If one has only 1 book up then it is not such an issue, but make a business of it and produce more than a certain number a year and the writer needs to think about tax more carefully.
[It goes without saying that if you live in a non-tax treaty country outside the USA then you need to think along the lines of "I need to make 30% more to pay for the money the IRS takes out." Of course, if you come from a country with a tax treaty, you need to consider how you will pay tax in your home country as well, which is not a small amount where I'm from.]
Thus, writers need to think about ‘LIVING+RETIREMENT FUND+TAX’ and then do the sum. For me that means $2.99 is the minimum I can charge for ANYTHING. There are only 20 x .99c short stories in my inventory and that’s only because they are just way too short (I might go back one day and pump them up a bit, so I can charge $2.99, but I’m probably too busy writing new stuff right now for that
Zoe makes some great points. I landed on the same conclusion via two interesting data points: the historical price of paperbacks and the price difference between a physical CD of music and an MP3 album. More here: http://www.landenchantment.com/how-much-should-an-ebook-novel-really-cost/
DR Ericksonon said: “Another pricing post without reference to discoverability/visibility. Pricing is easy. How to get noticed in a sea of books…that’s hard.”
Actually, I thought she covered that very well when she pointed out that customers and downloaders are two different groups of people.
When it comes to discoverability and how to get noticed, pricing is a red herring. It’s a nice smelly red herring that gets all the indie hounds chasing after it, but it doesn’t really lead to the fox at all.
Agree, Camille.
I haven’t offered a loss-leader yet, and while I can see that it sometimes works — I downloaded a freebie from a writer whose work I knew, liked it, and then bought the rest of the series. I did that only because I already knew who she was, just hadn’t seen that particular series. Maybe that freebie brought other readers in, I suspect it did. However, she was established and had a score of novels available.
In ebookery, quantity counts. More titles, more sales.
When I stick my stuff up as ebooks, I want to offer a good read at a fair price. (And since I’m willing to pay more for ebooks routinely than I charge for mine, that seems fair to me.)
Generally, my scale slides this way: $.99 for a short story; 3.99-4.99 for a short novel or non-fiction book; 5.99 for a novel; $6.99 for a long novel. This is way below what my traditional publishers ask for a hardbacks; less that paperbacks, and mostly a couple bucks less than what they ask for their ebook versions of my stuff.
Yeah, I’d love it if readers were lined up to pay the $12.99-14.99 that bestsellers get for their new ebooks, but I don’t see that as realistic in my case. On the other hand, $.99 for a novel, especially an original one, is mostly a mug’s game. Sure, there’s always the lightning-strikes surprise bestseller; but, if you are charging 99 cents for a book? You get only about 35 cents from Amazon.com per sale, and you have to sell a hundred copies to take the kids to Mickey D’s. A thousand copies won’t pay your monthly car note.
A thousand copies of a novel at $5.99? Your share pays the house note, the car note, the health insurance and buys groceries for the month.
Not that you’ll necessarily sell that many in a given month or even year, but the potential is there. Don’t undersell yourself.
Mark:
It isn’t a question of how writers price, but of the really terrible advice young writers are getting (mainly from each other). You wouldn’t hear from people like Dean or Zoe about prices if it weren’t for the fact that there is so much misinformation going on out there.
People who have absolutely no idea how business and marketing and discoverability work set themselves up as experts — not because they have real experience, but because they swear that nobody else has better experience. “eBooks are NEW! None of this has ever happened before! So my half-remembered knowledge of 6th grade economics about the how free-market economies works is all there is to know!”
Nonsense. This is not all new. It’s not even new to publishing, if you look more than a hundred years back. And there are certainly excellent models out there in other internet models, and other “gold rushes” and subsequent crashes, and in all the niches which have been marketing ebooks for over a decade.
And one of the things which is long established is the spreading of “get rich quick” nonsense by newbies and predatory “gurus.” If there is no one spreading a counter message, then there is nothing to help the newbies stop and think.
Remember, you may have heard this a million times, but there are a lot of new people out there who haven’t.
@Kenneth Guthrie,
Why would I need a retirement account as a writer? I’m planning on writing until I roll into the grave, and I don’t care what format my words present themselves as.
(Note: I understand the conventional wisdom of setting aside for retirement. My parents have been driving that home to me since I was 12 years old. But I’ve never really understood why/how it applies to writers. Our stories are our investments. And, no matter what form they come in, there will always be people who want good stories.)
It was a very good post and reiterated that we need to value our books and work more.
Cyn
“Actually, I thought she covered that very well when she pointed out that customers and downloaders are two different groups of people.”
Bingo. I’ve read about 1% of the free novels I’ve downloaded, about 25% of the novels I paid $0.99 for and all but one of the novels I paid >$0.99 for (and that one is next on the ‘to read’ list).
I’d rather find 1,000 fans willing to pay $5.99 for every book I write than have to find 20,000 new buyers each time for a new $0.99 book.
@Kenneth – Don’t get yourself stuck in the format question. My *intellectual property* is my retirement, and I’ll keep selling it in whatever formats arise. And by self-publishing, I have the rights and the flexibility to do that however I see fit.
Interesting, but think the market segmentation isn’t as great as she says. I suspect we disagree on it as well.
I wonder if she really thinks that people who get free books never buy highly priced ones? I assure you they do–or many do. I assure you that I do. There is a member of my family who buys dozens of 99 cent novels looking for new authors she might enjoy and also sends a LOT of money for her favorite authors.
I regularly check the Amazon free best seller lists for genres I read for something that looks interesting or one of my favorite authors giving something away that I haven’t bought yet. Does that mean I don’t buy their books and sometimes pay top dollar for them? Hell, no, it doesn’t. But I like buying avocados and artichokes at the grocery store on sale too. That doesn’t mean I don’t buy them when they’re not.
Pricing! Wow. You can lead a horse to water, but you can only beat it once it’s dead.
Not to dumb this down, but people who disagree with a person’s pricing strategy need to step back a bit. It’s *their* career. IF they want a discount career – fine. IF they want a 4.99/book career – fine. IF they want a 14.99/book career – fine.
It’s like ebay folks. It isn’t about what it is worth, because everyone has a different number in his/her head. It’s about what a seller and a buy can agree on. What the people who didn’t buy think really doesn’t mean anything.
If I were selling 20,000 ebooks a month at .99 or 5000 a month at 2.99 do you really think I would give a shit if guy A says I’m devaluing my work or guy B says I am over charging??
Dean hammers home the ‘every writer is different’ message constantly. Every writer is going to go to market differently too. Who cares how they do it?
What the critics are missing is that when people liek Zoe or Dean talk pricing, it is not about justifying themselves so much as it is information they are sharing for people who are interested in the discussion. Judging the worth of their business plan is pointless – they don’t care what you think of their plan. They are posting in case WE care what THEY think. And I, for one, do. Lots of us who pay attention to this do. We are trying to learn from them – taking what we agree with and rejecting what we do not.
But at no point in time do I imagine (and I don’t mean to speak for him) Dean really gives a damn what I think of his business model. So crying about it is pointless, no?
Dean and Zoe are saying ‘I feel…’ or ‘In my experience…’ That’s it. Period. They also have writing careers – I, currently, don’t.
If I start outselling the Bible, maybe my opinion will mean something to long term pros. Until then, I think I’ll shut up and listen.
Camille,
“eBooks are NEW! None of this has ever happened before! So my half-remembered knowledge of 6th grade economics about the how free-market economies works is all there is to know!”
Economics class in school? Pardon me while I guffaw. If economics was ever taught in grade, middle, or high school before, it ain’t now. At least not from what I’ve seen (which admittedly is far from a representative scientific sample). It’s not taught until the college level, and then only in business school or to economics majors unless someone actively seeks it out. I agree it SHOULD be a required a field of study for all, but I sorely doubt that most people are ever exposed to the facts of life in this sense. So perhaps the folks you’re talking about can be forgiven a little. Just a little.
Michael, that wasn’t Camille saying that, she was doing as you are doing and arguing against that “quoted” statement from another source. And I agree with Camille, this is NOT NEW. Not even in publishing. The only reason this is new to anyone is because they first don’t understand basic economics and second don’t bother to understand any history of the business they are walking into. That’s why for so many of us “old-timers” we were well ahead of this.
Micheal: yeah, that was my point. We have folks setting themselves up as experts based on what they learned in school, which was nothing, and claiming that nobody else knows more than they did when they didn’t pay attention in class.
The point here is not to criticize those who are ignorant, or even to convince people to change their minds about anything.
The point is to counteract the effects who militantly spread their ignorance. Because nobody has a choice if all they’ve heard are myths.
Exactly, Camille!! Exactly.
I honestly don’t see what’s complicated about pricing. It’s easy to calculate the revenue per sale.
What none of us have any precise answers to is how pricing affects sales volume. And since every book is unique and every sales period is unique, there’s never going to be one price that works best for every book.
That’s why I think it’s a bit disingenuous to argue that pricing at $4.99 is the right thing to do. It’s right for an individual writer if he or she comes to that conclusion, but it’s not right for every writer. Some books by some writers may earn more money at $2.99 or $0.99 than they will at a higher price.
Mark, that I agree with. I am not saying that any price is right for all writers. Never said that. In fact, I’ve been pushing hard and will push hard again to break writers out of the idea of cheap being better for EVERY writer. Sometimes more expensive is a better price for some writers. So I agree, I hate the idea that ALL WRITERS must do the same thing and that’s what I fight all the time against here. Or try to. Myths are very strong, even the new ones about the 99 cent price.
Interesting. I was wondering how other people’s experiences with quality of readers at different prices has turned out.
Have you, Dean, seen much on this/collected anything on it? Because that would be the largest factor here. And as a book stays on the market for one, then two, then five years, having quality readers who have actually read your work will help you out in the long run (that trickle that will maintain a steady flow, because books, rather than a lot of other forms of entertainment, in my experience, aren’t talked about very often, so I recommend a book only rarely, while a song is easier to recommend to just about anyone). Whereas having readers who don’t look at your work, or complain that at 99cents it’s too short, then you should see a blip, then nothing. Correct?
Or have people really experienced different things with the same price?
@Joshua Kehe about retirement funds. I figure I cannot count on my health permitting me to write all through my old age. I *hope* I will be able to do so, simply because I love it, but the average number of years of incapacity at the end of life in the US (from In Fitness and In Health by Maffetone) is 12. Some of us writers will be going strong into our 80′s. Others, no. Best to be prepared. (But you know this. Just saying.)