Will 99-Cent E-Books Destroy The World As We Know It?

kaitie said:

I'm sure I've said it before, but seeing a couple of generic five-star reviews obviously written by friends or family or someone who hasn't even read the book is enough to make me not only not buy a book, but be highly annoyed.

I don't see the "like" thing as all that different. Like movieman said, all it does is make it less reliable for me and I'll stop trusting it.

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Agreed.

I always look at the source of the reviews if there aren't many. Popular books are a bit different, for obvious reasons, but self-pubbed books (and honestly, some small press stuff I've seen) that have 3 or 5 or 8 5-star reviews so often will have most or all of those written by someone who has never reviewed another book on Amazon, or reviewed only one or two things right before or after reviewing that.

It only takes a glance. It's also pretty telling when you hit a small press book by someone with a fairly popular name in writing circles that has tons of glowing reviews. Read the few negative ones, and they almost always say something about being fooled by the tons of positive reviews. I've even some that said the writers group of writing buddies or podcast listeners must have been all the reviewers. The negative ones are more likely to be from people who review stuff regularly, too, in my experience.

I wonder how many non-writer readers check the reviewers' histories, though?

Shelley

If I were one of those people who can dash off a decently readable short novel in a month or so, I would be happy with the .99 price. But I can't. "Emerald" took many, many months of research and writing labor and I think it's a bargain at 3.99! My next novel with the same series characters will be shorter and I will price it at 2.99. I do think that the .99 cent bandwagoners really cheapen the whole e-book playing field, which is really unfortunate.

Brian January
http://amzn.com/B005WM0HN6
http://amzn.com/B006QCZF3S

kindle books

defyalllogic said:

I don't think anything will destroy the world as we know it aside from viruses and radiation...

Also, if I can pay .99 cents for unregulated anything or 4.99 for edited and screened awesomeness, I'd rather pay 4.99. ...

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I published my first Kindle book three days ago; choosing the $0.99 price. It has been freely available online for about a year (the link is in the signature below). It did not occur to me that some people will think that lower price is an indicator of lower quality. But this might be true.

Ludwik Kowalski (see Wikipedia)
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I do not think that the 99cents ebooks will hurt the market for established authors. This is because most of the 99cents books tend to be by self-published authors, and many of the books are not of the qualities of the books published by a more established publisher. For one thing, most of the 99cents books are poorly edited and some of them have poor storylines. Buyers of books usually buy books that are highly recommended and rarely take a chance with a new and unheard of authors. Therefore, established authors will still be their preferred choice when it comes to book buying.

Buyers of books usually buy books that are highly recommended and rarely take a chance with a new and unheard of authors.

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I have not found this to be true. When I purchased an iPad, I downloaded the free Kindle app and only downloaded books by authors I did not know who were offering books for free. After several months, I began purchasing the lower-priced e-books, again, from lesser known authors. I believe people are willing to give new authors a chance if the story sounds interesting, the cover art is good, and the blurb about the book is well-written and piques their interest. Especially since they can use the "Look Inside" feature to read a bit of the book before deciding whether they want to buy or not.

I've been think about this. I know (as we all know!) how much time and energy goes into the writing of a novel. So with that in mind, the idea of giving my book away just galls me. The same is true of the .99 price. When I tell people that I have a novel out there at 3.99, the look in their eyes says, "You must be an amateur--or it's a piece of garbage--to sell it at that price". So I have to explain that readers' expectations have been unreasonably lowered concerning e-book prices and it's the writers who are getting the shaft.

My opinion is--and it's only an opinion--we should turn this whole thing around and get what we deserve! After all, if you're self-publishing, you are the publishing house, and have to take care of all the marketing, etc. So why shouldn't we get paid properly for it?

Brian January
http://amzn.com/B005WM0HN6
http://amzn.com/B006QCZF3S

brianjanuary said:

I've been think about this. I know (as we all know!) how much time and energy goes into the writing of a novel. So with that in mind, the idea of giving my book away just galls me. The same is true of the .99 price. When I tell people that I have a novel out there at 3.99, the look in their eyes says, "You must be an amateur--or it's a piece of garbage--to sell it at that price". So I have to explain that readers' expectations have been unreasonably lowered concerning e-book prices and it's the writers who are getting the shaft.

My opinion is--and it's only an opinion--we should turn this whole thing around and get what we deserve! After all, if you're self-publishing, you are the publishing house, and have to take care of all the marketing, etc. So why shouldn't we get paid properly for it?

Brian January
http://amzn.com/B005WM0HN6

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That would be nice, but unfortunately it's fairly difficult to convince a reader to pay more than $3.00 or $4.00 for a new author's writing, especially when they have no other books out.

I've priced my 114,000 word novel at $2.99 for the ebook edition and I don't plan on going higher than that. Maybe down the road I will, but I feel that if I went higher it wouldn't sell.

I have a pretty straight forward approach to this. I self publish through my own publishing house. I price things by wordcount. Less than 3k is free, posted on my website. 3-10k is marketed as a short story for $0.99. 10-35k is a novella, sold for $2.99, and 35k+ goes for $5.99. The rational is this: as a new writer I do not generate the interest or sales to make the $0.99 price signifigantly worthwhile. I've sold just as many copies of the one novella for $2.99 as I have of any of the $0.99 shorts. And made more off the novella sales than off the shorts combined.

If people are hooked by your cover, blurb, and "free teaser", they'll buy the story. If they're not, they won't buy it if it's only $0.01! Bottomline is to make your work worth buying and then charge what it is worth.

Slightly OT but didn't want to start a new thread for a quickly answered question:
Where does one find all those 99c and free books on Kindle? All I get in the menu is the Kindle store front with the usual bestsellers etc.

I posted a thread about covers and came to the conclusion that, while a cover is important, readers more often become interested due to the topic/subject material of the novel.
So, perhaps pricing should be based upon what the public is interested in?
For example, it seems that romance is the leading seller in both regular and ebooks, so doesn't it make sense to give those a more competitive price?

Just my 2 cents worth.

aruna said:

Slightly OT but didn't want to start a new thread for a quickly answered question:
Where does one find all those 99c and free books on Kindle? All I get in the menu is the Kindle store front with the usual bestsellers etc.

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Search or browse for a topic/genre that interests you then sort by price. You'll typically have lots of choices at those price points regardless of what you searched for.

Aruna, Amazon has a Top 100 Free and Paid Kindle Book List. Search for that and you'll find the top free and paid e-books.

Thanks! I was just wondering how someone as a newly-e-self-published a writer gets seen at all! But I know there's a forum on AW dedicated to this so I will go there.

I get most my books paperback/some hardcover from betterworldbooks.com
their bargin bin is an excellent shopping source
(my last order 17 books at $3 apiece) books I can read, then either keep (if I really enjoyed them) give them to friends, sell them at a lawn sale, or give them away to a library or school. can you do that with a e-book?

No, but you can lend a book through Amazon to someone for two weeks.

And it turns out that 99-cent ebooks didn't destroy the world as we know it. Rather, they destroyed 99-cent ebooks.

I was so excited when I saw books for 0.99, but then I started reading them. Mind you, there are some jems out there. You definitely can't judge a book by the price.

But!

I've noticed a trend down in quality along with the price decline. People aren't taking pride in the books they're putting out there. It's like a patchwork of high school reading class.

Mostly it just bums me out for the books that are really good, and tend to be overlooked, just based on price.

I put my novella up for $2.99. In my mind it's worth that. But each writer has to make that choice on their own.

I guess we should be glad we can make that choice...lol

My best seller is a $1.99 short story originally published years ago in GRIT magazine. It doesn't sell more than five copies a month but I have no problem asking for that price when it's a good story that's been in a major magazine.

My other short stories at $0.99 hardly sell at all. Good thing they're all reprints.

pixydust said:

I put my novella up for $2.99. In my mind it's worth that. But each writer has to make that choice on their own.

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The price of my Kindle book

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0065TVGEO/?tag=absowrit-20

is only $0.99. I know it is worth more. But I want more readers. Here is what they will see, after clicking the link to display my profile:


Ludwik Kowalski turned 80 in October 2011. Born in Poland, educated in the USSR, Poland and France, he came to the USA in 1964 with a doctorate (Sorbonne) in nuclear physics. After his first four years as a postdoc at Columbia University, he became a professor at Montclair State University. He is the author and co-author of well over one hundred publications and conference presentation (see Wikipedia). Ludwik and his wife Linda--they were married in 1967--live in Fort Lee, New Jersey. They have one daughter and one granddaughter.

Ludwik’s father, a civil engineer in Poland, left for the Soviet Union in 1931. An idealistic communist, he believed it was his duty to emigrate, and to contribute to the building of a new society. In 1938 he was arrested and sent to a Gulag camp, where he died two years later, at the age of 36. This did not prevent the young Ludwik from becoming a dedicated Stalinist and a communist party member after returning to Poland. Two of his books, "Hell on Earth,” published in 2008, based on numerous references, and "Tyranny to Freedom,” published in 2009, based on diaries written in Poland, France, and the United States. are devoted to reflections on communist ideology. The first book describes facts with which young Americans are not always familiar; the second traces Ludwik’s evolution from one extreme to another, from a devoted communist to an active anti-communist.
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pixydust said:

I've noticed a trend down in quality along with the price decline. People aren't taking pride in the books they're putting out there. It's like a patchwork of high school reading class.

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No, the writers are just as proud as can be of their books.

What's happening is this: Electronic self-publishing means printing the slush pile, and most slush is ... dire.

Doesn't matter if you set the price at $0.99 or $99.00, most of it is pretty poor.

James D. Macdonald said:

No, the writers are just as proud as can be of their books.

What's happening is this: Electronic self-publishing means printing the slush pile, and most slush is ... dire.

Doesn't matter if you set the price at $0.99 or $99.00, most of it is pretty poor.

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I think that, in the end, only readers who bother to write reviews determine the quality and marketability of the work.
I've noticed that most books on the Amazon Best Seller List have good reviews.

Comments?

Reviews are subjective. If you compare reviews for the first book in my romance trilogy, you'll find a wide range of thoughts at Amazon (from worst book ever read to loved it, hope you write more). Over at B&N, there are more reviews, but fewer written reviews. The overall rating is higher. Many people just left a star rating and almost all of them are listed as anonymous. The ranking has stayed at an even level pretty much all along, no matter what the price of the book was. You'd think they were two different books. They are the same.

As far as sales, the consumer has always had the final say in what they want to spend their money on. Now, there are many more choices. Are they quality choices? Each person who plunks down their money is making that determination.