I will be withdrawing my three $.99 omnibus ebook editions of my stories currently on Amazon 30 April 2024. Over the past year I've sold less than 25 of them, and while I had no set expectations to be met, they haven't done what I set out to do, which is to significantly expand my non-US sales by offering my ebooks at as near to the free price as I was selling them at on Amazon.com. More over, in January, of this year, after some 8 plus years, Amazon stopped price-matching the free price of most of my ebooks. So be it. They gave me a chance to find an audience, and now it's time to leave the nest and fly...
It has been my experience that any reasonable price more than free is not a large factor in determining sales. No matter what price you put on a ebook, it is a hundred times harder to sell than a free ebook. There seems no point selling ebooks at $.99 when you can sell almost as many of them at, say $3.99. Your increased royalties and royalty rate will more than make up the volume difference in sales.
In my case, I've an out of date idea of what things should cost. I used to buy real paperback books for $.40- $.50 back in the day, so that even $.99 seems high to me for a digital file. But the reality is that the paperback books I used to by at those old prices now sell for something like $8 today so that even my most expensive ebook, at $4.99 is a bargain. Less than a cup of coffee, as many author/publishers point out. So be it.
The lesson learned here is that visibility is the primary factor in sales. If potential customers never sees a book, they can't buy it. $.99 doesn't make books more visible.
You can still download ebook versions of all of my books for free from Smashwords and at least read them for free from a host of other retailers. You can also listen to them for free on the Google Play Store, and (maybe some day) from Apple.
It was a useful, but not very successful experiment. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
So, if you want those ebooks on your kindle, now is the time to buy! May first 2024 will be too late! Act Now!
Hi,
ReplyDeletemaybe there are other reasons if sales on Amazon are not successful.
For example, Kindle is *evil*. It won't display .epub files, and files meant for it will or won't be readable on normal E-Book-Readers. There are extra protected file formats, and to convert them to be .epub-able, violates the applicable laws relating to the copyright. (There are others which can be imported with standard software like Calibre, but it is complicated to find out which type they are).
Furthermore, a few years ago I was intelligent enough to download e-book files from Amazon, which could be legally imported by calibre and read with a non-Kindle type of ebook-reader or by Amazon's app for reading Kindle on a PC. Today, they disappear in Nirvana and I am never able to trace them down, let aside manage them in what is the standard software for e-boos, Calibre.
In Europe, there was special attention throughout all forums and newsmedia, when Amazon deleted the paid novella "1984" from anybodies Kindle, and there have been reported further cases where e-books were deleted from the Kindle of, for example, users who got online with their Kindle outside of their own country, because the Amazon servers considered them to be pirated copies sent to an other country. So, part of the users might be attracted by the advertising from Amazon. Others, like me, are absolutely determined never to deal with them.
Kind regards,
Hannes from Germany
Maybe. I think half of my readers are from outside the US, but those are free books, not paid ones. The main reason is that it's a whole lot harder to sell books for any price. You have to work at that, and spend money to make money. I don't. Really, I just need their slots on my spreadsheet -- 18 book columns was making it too wide :)
DeleteGood morning,
ReplyDeletecorrect, Chuck. On the other hand, probably most of the customers refusing to buy books which are not free, do so because they have no cash to spare. Before E-Books became available, my price limit for books was 30 or 50 Euro-cents on flea markets.
Retirement money in Germany, for example, is'nt that opulent. The average per months is the equivalent value of four hundred kilogramm apples or 2700 kilowatt hours or one hundred tickets with the bus to the doctor in the nearest village ;) . No way I would buy a book out of the lists of the best for twenty-four or even eight Euros, and I think they are not on those lists because they are the best, but they are the best known and pushed. I still buy books if I like their style, of course... but only if I had a chance to read one.
Kind regards,
Hannes from Germany
I'm sure $.99 USD buys a whole lot more elsewhere in the world, and is probably better spent for other things, which is why my preferred price is free. When I first started buying SF paperbacks they were $.40 - .50. It was hard to spend $5 - $6+ thirty years later. The value of things tend to stick with you, regardless of inflation. Paying anything more that $2 on an electric file, is hard for me. But younger people have a different experience, so I let them pay more, if they care to. Few do.
ReplyDelete