The Impression 99-Cent Pricing Might Give

The thing I wonder about is how many people will actually read and review the e-book they bought for the price of a smartphone app.

I've experimented a couple of times now with pricing an 80k word novel at $0.99, well below its starting price. In my experience it does not attract more readers now even samplers, it's a warn-off. I sold more copies at the higher price and hardly sold any at Tge lower.

I've just repriced a few of my works, marking them back up to the higher price. I wasn't making any money on them at the lower price so they might as well make me more money at the higher.

The 99 cent price definitely works for some books and genres - it worked for the first book in Amanda Hocking's trilogies and for other young adult books (off the top of my head, I can think of Hush Money by Susan Bischoff). And by "work" I mean, they garnered attention and reviews. I'm sure the authors did a lot of publicity, too, though. You can't assume because it's cheap, people will buy it and review it.

AmsterdamAssassin said:

The thing I wonder about is how many people will actually read and review the e-book they bought for the price of a smartphone app.

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I wonder this, too. I think I must be a different kind of reader from a lot of people, because I hesitate even when buying 99 cent books because I don't want to end up with a bunch of books I'll never read (and yet, that doesn't stop be from downloading free books ). Out of the seven 99 cent books I bought this year, I've read and reviewed three of them, two I'm in the middle of, one I haven't started, and the last I probably won't finish (funnily enough, it was Switched by Amanda Hocking).

I can understand 99 cents for a short story, but I also understand 99 cent books for completely new authors. A reader might take a gamble on $1 verses $3.

FOTSGreg - this may be completely unwarranted advice, but I don't know if I'd buy any of your books regardless of the price simply because the blurbs aren't long enough to interest me. One line isn't enough to convince me to buy a book. I don't know how long it is or even what the genre is. I know there's always sampling, but if there's nothing in the blurb or cover or reviews to interest a reader, then why would they open the sample to test the writing? Just an idea, though slightly off-topic. . .

eward said:

I wonder this, too. I think I must be a different kind of reader from a lot of people, because I hesitate even when buying 99 cent books because I don't want to end up with a bunch of books I'll never read (and yet, that doesn't stop be from downloading free books ).

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I sample everything that has a price tag. (I do download some free books but fewer and fewer as time goes by.) I also continue to judge books by their covers. Give me a great cover and I'm halfway hooked.

But the "under a buck" thing seemed to have worked for Hocking and Locke.

Had great success with the 99 cent price this summer. It's a good price for getting new readers to try stories, especially in niche genres.

For me, it started getting people interested in my books and buying them regularly.

I'm planning short stories linked to the Amsterdam Assassin series that will be sold for 99 cents, but that's because they're short stories. The series itself will 100K novels, and you can download a free sample to see if you like my writing, but the whole book will be a fair price.

It's an interesting question, you are trying to get into the heads of people you have never met nor will ever directly communicate with and find a price that might catch their interest.

I now have two stories published for the Kindle, my Space Opera, The Nameless War and as of last week my novella, The Job Offer ( http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005M4KGWQ/?tag=absowrit-20 )

The Job Offer is a thirty thousand word piece so it's not a piece that is worth big money even if I was an established writer (which I'm definitely not). But I thought that to price at 0.99 I might simply blend in with the crowd, so as an experiment I decided to price slightly higher at 1.25. Week one looks set to end with a dozen sales (six on .com, 6 on .uk). I've decided I'm going to give it a month then review the situation.

ebar said:

I've decided I'm going to give it a month then review the situation.

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Indeed. Maybe even two months. Don't get nervous about slow sales, just persist for a few months before you doubt yourself and change what doesn't need to be changed.

eward, no problem. I really, truly suck at writing blurbs. It's damned near the same with query letters.

I priced my first book at $1.99, wondering the exact same thing: does this give the impression of the book nothing being high-quality? I personally stay away from lower-priced books because, yea, I automatically assume it's probably a badly-edited self-published title. At the same time, I'm sure I'm missing out on a lot of great writing that way, so I check out forums such as AW and scour Goodreads to see what people are recommending.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, whether I buy a book has a lot more to do with just price. But at first glance, a "cheap" book does make me wonder if it's going to be any good...

I purchased a self-pubbed book for my kindle back in April, I paid 6.99 for it. I can't read it! It's so badly edited that it makes it impossible for me to read. On the other hand I downloaded a freebie in May and an .99 book in June, both were by far better books not only because they cost me less but also because they were well written and edited well.

Moral of my story (and why it is relevant to this thread) - You really can't judge a book by it's price or it's status as self-pubbed (granted there are more badly self-pubbed books out there than good ones but every once in a while you find a highly polished diamond in a pile of rough faded crystals).

I agree that a lot of self-pubbed books exist. One has only to read things like Previews on places like CreateSpace to realize 90 out of 100 writers have no idea how to write or edit. I would be very upset if I paid even 1 cent for one of those.

There are gems. Check reviews to find them.

There seems to be some consensus building in other web enclaves that 2.99 is a good price-point for self-pubbed books. You earn a higher percentage from Amazon, and it adds some psychological cachet (i.e. you're not lowballing your work). Definitely something to be said for not diluting your own brand.

Thought I saw another post elsewhere indicating one author's sales improved after he raised his price from .99 to 2.99.

I fleetingly considered pricing at $0.99 for a novel, but promptly realized that I'd then have no ability to do promotions without dropping the price for free, and I'd have no short story wiggle room.

So I came up with a pricing scheme (for now) that depends on the story length. It'll probably change at the end of the year or when I have more novels out.

I found that my sales dropped when I changed A Fistful of Fire to $2.99 from $3.99, not that they were high to begin with.

I had pretty good success when I was pricing the first book in my series at .99. It seemed to draw people in and increase sales of the other books in the series. Now that I have decent sales and rankings of the other books, I've raised the price to $2.99.

The low price is a tool, like so many other tools. Use it, don't use it, use it sparingly, it's all up to you and your mileage WILL vary. Most folks who have found great success with novels priced at $.99 have had other books in the same series/universe to promote, and many have been successful.

But some folks, like another poster in this thread, prefer to use short stories in the same universe priced at that point to draw readers in. That's the tactic I'm now taking, but if I decide to run a $.99 special at some point during the holiday season to draw new readers in once they get their Christmas Kindles, I think that would not be a bad thing.

Chilly said:

There seems to be some consensus building in other web enclaves that 2.99 is a good price-point for self-pubbed books. You earn a higher percentage from Amazon, and it adds some psychological cachet (i.e. you're not lowballing your work). Definitely something to be said for not diluting your own brand.

Thought I saw another post elsewhere indicating one author's sales improved after he raised his price from .99 to 2.99.

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I totally agree. $2.99 is a decent price for an e-book.

While we're on the subject, what do you think the word count would be for certain price points?

For me, a short story can easily be priced at .99. This is especially true with the Kindle Singles since you get a 70% royalty instead of 35%. But after that, what word counts would match certain prices?

I just changed the price of my first book (YA fantasy, 48,000 words) from free to 1.99. I'm going to try and stick with this price point until the end of the year, but I cannot help wondering if I'm missing out on sales because the price might still be too low (as odd as that sounds).

The book I have coming out in Nov. is around 90,000 words and I plan on pricing it at 2.99. Thing is, it's a numbers game. There's no telling what will sell at certain price points, which I think is one reason why we change our prices so often.

AmsterdamAssassin said:

I'm planning short stories linked to the Amsterdam Assassin series that will be sold for 99 cents, but that's because they're short stories. The series itself will 100K novels, and you can download a free sample to see if you like my writing, but the whole book will be a fair price.

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This is pretty much the approach I'm taking, writing a series of related shorts to build an audience, price them at 99c (they're all around 10K words each), bundle them into collections including previously unreleased stories and price the collections at somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.99-5.99 (dep on number of total and pre-released titles), then hit the market with a full-length novel.

Although there's clearly no magic bullet to SP success, there do seem to be certain principles: produce quality products (writing, editing, formatting, design), price competitively and reprice as necessary to churn interest, promote (x3), publish often and regularly. I can write, polish and publish shorts on about a 2-3 week cycle, so that's how I'm developing the early biz. Still in the 1st month and being patience (real promo won't start for another couple months), so I'll be interested in hearing of others' experiences trying the same/similar approach.

As for length vs price. yes, I think length is a factor in pricing, but not the only one. Genre plays a role. For shorts, though, (anything less that 15K) I think it would be hard to justify anything above 99c, which leaves pretty much free as your promotional price, but I'm okay with that.

I don't agree with the price=quality thing at all on ebooks (which really does head into PA nonsense).


An ebook is not a pair of boots or a winter coat, nor even a physical book, where the cost of materials comes into play.


Since there doesn't seem to be a logic base for judging the price of SP ebooks (say, pro edited for $2.99 and unedited for $.99) all I have to judge with are the same things as any other book - cover, blurb, sample (usually in that order).

The two things that are your biggest barrier are buzz and competing with free e-books. I have so much great stuff that is now public domain, that writers have chosen to offer for free digitally (and of course, some free ebooks that were so bad, I deleted them after suffering through the first page).

You have to offer me something better than what I can get for free.

Well my novella that I mentioned does seem to be getting some sales. Released on the 8th of September, it ended the month on forty sales split evenly between Amazon.com and Amazon.UK. Not exactly setting the world on fire but not sinking without a trace. Certainly I'm going to leave the price be for the moment

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005M4KGWQ/?tag=absowrit-20

I think 99 cents only works well if you have higher upsells on your backlist. If you have one 99 cent book and no others then I think people will get the "cheap" feeling.

At least in my case, when I see a 99 cent "intro" novel and then several more higher priced ones I think two things:

A) this writer knows how to price correctly
B) this writer's books are "probably" readable because they've got a few under their belt

But I don't get the same feeling from a one book writer.

I also suspect that having a book that's actually priced higher and then is marked down to .99 would be more effective than that as a starting point. It gives more of the impression that one's receiving a bargain rather than just a cheaply made product.

People may review it.
I don't think it's the impression you leave with the price so much as it is the feeling of wasted revenue with the royalty percentage being so much lower.