Pricing

In my last post, I mentioned changing the advertising distribution. This post, I’m going to mention a pricing change that I’m trying out. Both of my recent books, First and Next Time, came out at $0.99 USD for the eBook version when they were published. Mainly because it gives an incentive for people to buy the book at a discounted price. I’ve mentioned here before that Amazon, the market where in my experience 97%+ of eBooks are sold, has an interesting royalty model. For eBooks prices at $0.99, the author receives $0.35 in royalty. At $1.99, the author gets $0.70. But at $2.99, the royalty goes up to $2.10. I know, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, either. And clearly I’m not in this game to get rich, but it’s also nice to get a little more quid with each sale. Last year at some point I ratcheted First up to $1.99 and then several months back I raised it to $2.99. It hasn’t hurt sales and actually might have helped. Next Time has been at $1.99 for quite a while and done reasonably well. This week I raised the price to $2.99 and we’ll see how it goes. I know that there are people who equate price with value, so maybe I’ll capture some of those. We’ll try it for a few weeks. If sales drop off noticeably, I can change it back and the blurb on the book’s page will mention that it’s the lowest price in the last 30 days. If nothing else, at that people would get a little incentive. In the meantime, what’s a dollar between friends?