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I've never been happy with pricing books at 99c and am barely happier pricing them at $2.99; I think an ebook of a full-length novel should cost $9.99. On the other hand, I'd dearly love for paperbacks to cost 9.99 again...

My publishers have been watching Dakota's sales since I suggested her prices be increased as an experiment. Instead of cutting into sales, the higher prices (4.99, up from 2.99, and 9.99 for the trilogy set) have increased sales in three ways: by shifting sales to the set as an obvious bargain but without cutting into single volume growth, by straightforward increase of the single volumes sales for reasons that may just be natural growth, and -- this is the interesting one -- a growth in sales of multiple volumes at one go to the same customer, which we speculate may be a sign of attracting a better or at least better off class of customer.

This last (an increase in sales of several single volumes per customer per transaction) applies specifically at Smashwords, who will on request send you a report of each individual purchase. It may also be a sign that customers take higher prices as a sign of quality -- note that we tried the experiment with an author who has a big, strong nine-book series and an established readership for it with lots of quality reviews, no suspect Amazon dreck, so maybe the dice are loaded a wee bit and what we're measuring isn't market growth at the new price but readers of the earlier books deciding to stock up before the publisher raises prices again.

You must understand that we're speculating from a very small base -- only the numbers from Smashwords are that explicitly presented -- and simply assuming that the pattern is the same at the other vendors. But I honestly think the pattern is likely to be repeated or even intensified at Apple; after all, people who buy books there have bought much more expensive tablets and phones than the Kindle; Apple defines "upmarket".

No guarantee it works with anybody else's books, of course. But it is another indicator that CoolMain did the right thing by leaving Amazon off the list of its vendors; one of the horrid downsides of Amazon is that so much rubbish is pushed on customers solely on price, that a publisher cannot price good books according to their desserts.

15 years ago, I could have given you a solid 1 to 4 conversion. Meaning that for every 4 cheaper sales, at least one would go the higher price. Unfortunately, the economy of 15 years ago is massively worse off than it is today.

No matter how we view it, reading is a moment of luxury. How people spend their downtime is valuable. But we also have the law of unnatural gravity with ownership. Anything purchased is more dear to the buyer than something given to them for free. Price is the force of gravity itself. The higher they pay, the more attracted they are to that product.

This is common knowledge in the world of sales, but, and I stress 'but' here because it's a doozy... the market for this particular luxury item is also flooded.

What happens to the diamond market when we have an abundance of diamonds? Prices are lowered to clean out the inventory.

Ebooks have suffered a similar tragedy, but only problem, these ebooks are limitless. Even paperback volumes have more of an asset value, due to their existence.

So what we have is a luxury item that was always in reach for buying power of the middle class and some folks who are in the working poor area, becoming cheap as all get out thanks to the antic of the 'Zon.

Free diamonds anyone? Who wouldn't grab at that pile and hurry off! The moment you ever have a title go free, that is exactly what happens.

The prices of iPhones, tablets and ereaders aren't luxury items, but are considered as a growing necessity. Premium content is offered for free with a one time purchase, like Prime was for the first year of Amazon Fire customers, which only lowers expectations.

I estimate today is more around 1 in 30 will pay higher prices, but then we must do the math. If the laws of economic averages hold out, would you rather have 29 sales at .99, or only one sale at 9.99?

The 'Zon knows which one glistens more money from the masses, and yes, they'll also love their infrequent higher prices from those with the popularity to sell them, but at the cost of everyone else, including us, the providers of the content from the very beginning.

Until the economy gets better and people are happier with spending more money on their valuable down time, we're not going to see huge sales figures... unless one of us ends up with a new popular title that folks can't get enough of.

God help us all.

Daniel wrote: "No matter how we view it, reading is a moment of luxury."

Smartest thing you ever said Daniel. Also the least true. While it is probably true for quality literature, I think it likely that the readers of romance suffer from a compulsion, and the readers of porn too. But in general, reading is part of a spectrum that must compete with television and, often overlooked by commentators, games. Also, while in my house everyone has one or more workrooms, I can imagine that in a shared living room made hellish by the noise of television and games, a moment of silence to read in is a true luxury.

Raising prices has done Dakota's sales no harm. We'll see what happens when the other CoolMain authors' books have their prices raised.

A friend, a marketer, not a writer, says, "You're overlooking the fact that people who want to read high quality motor racing novels can read Dakota or go without. That will skew your results upwards, though how far is impossible to tell." So we have another factor to consider, a distinctive subject or treatment.

Andre Jute wrote: "So we have another factor to consider, a distinctive subject or treatment."

Bingo!

Dakota's novels are her own niche, as far as I can see when I do the standard search. Every reader she hooks with her excellent writing, they will look for Dakota first before going to another genre. As others express their enjoyment, more readers will look, get hooked and buy. That is the selling power of being unique.

My genres are Science Fiction and Fantasy. I don't have a unique pitch, but I'm competing in a larger arena. It's hard, but doable.

Romance and Porn has an audience akin to that black-curtain area movie rental stores used to have, before most of them shut down because VHS tapes became outdated, only to be preceded by the skeleton crew served by DVDs. Now there is only a small red box serving that customer base in America, one where there is little to no overhead and no employees. These readers will rarely, if at all, leave their comfort zone. We know why. You stated it 100% accurate. Because the black-curtain is no longer there, going to text in droves does not surprise me, as they no longer have any other outlet other than Playboy or Hustler.

Even in my selected genre of pure Science Fiction, at $2.99 per, my Darya series wouldn't sell squat, even with the improved covers, distributed by SW. But when I raised the prices when I moved to D2D to $4.99, I am up to 17 sales in just three weeks, in places that never sold before. Namely B&N and Apple.

This was unexpected for me. Sci-Fi is a large ocean in and of itself.

As for the quality of literature, I don't know a single author in Robust that has produced anything less than high quality content. I hope nobody takes this the wrong way, because it's more analytical thinking than subjective review, but if high quality writing was to influence our sales as much as we all hoped, every one of us should be making six digits a year.

Yet, there are those folks out there who write on a 5th grade reading level and are cruising to the bank with large smiles on their uneducated faces. You may know whom I speak of.

I must Sherlock this a little more.

Daniel wrote: "Even in my selected genre of pure Science Fiction, at $2.99 per, my Darya series wouldn't sell squat, even with the improved covers, distributed by SW. But when I raised the prices when I moved to D2D to $4.99, I am up to 17 sales in just three weeks, in places that never sold before. Namely B&N and Apple."

We're back at those vendors doing something different, or your mere presence there confirming you as a more desirable writer. Of course, it may just be novelty sales: you're new, therefore on a list somewhere. We'll see in a few months.

I'm watching this thread.

Andre Jute wrote: "Daniel wrote: " Of course, it may just be novelty sales: you're new, therefore on a list somewhere."

While wearing a fictional tweed overcoat with an imaginary pipe in my mouth, my Sherlock mode did a double take at this part of your message.

It's not untrue for D2D, but it isn't accurate for everywhere else I published my titles.

Let us regard a title I do not have at D2D. It's one of my remaining titles on Amazon. It recently went off of the free list.

Defenders of Valinthia
Product Details
File Size: 684 KB
Print Length: 283 pages
Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
Publication Date: May 5, 2012
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Language: English
ASIN: B0080VP93E
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
Not Enabled
Word Wise: Not Enabled
Lending: Enabled
Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,908,398 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#6079 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Military
#9509 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Sword & Sorcery
#9637 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Military
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Okay, first of all, major ranking change. It was just over 100 when in freebie mode. When it became paid only, the rankings did a mjor change. However, this title is 3 years and 6 months old.

In those three years, I have earned a total of 18 reviews. Here is a link to those reviews.



Egads that is a long link... but with a glance, you can tell where I stand with those who read this genre.

Over at Apple, this same Novel has been given away to a touch more that 12,000 people over the same amount of time and has gained a total of 5 reviews, all 5 star.



With Amazon, B&N, Apple, Kobo, all those guys and more, this title has been given away to more than 29,000 readers in 3 and a half years. Only in the last two weeks did it go to being un-free.

When in free mode, about a dozen per week would get downloaded. Now it costs a 5 spot, downloads have flat lined. Beeoooooooooo-------

I am not going to charge the paddles to 300 more free days just to shock a pulse back into it.

The only beneficial side effect of giving so many away has been in folks buying the other two in the trilogy, but less than 3% do so.

So now what would happen if I updated those covers and planted them on D2D? The only two changes would be the cover, and the publish date would go to the day they got listed, and it wouldn't look like it was 3+ years anymore.

My Darya series finished September with 29 sales on D2D, and as of this morning, October is off to an interesting start with a handful more. If it was the covers alone, the few months they sat on Smashwords with them yielded no results... until the publish date showed that it was a 'new' book.

Then it hit me like a pile of bricks. When people shop, they like their choices to be fresh, to be newer.

This has taught me a few valuable lessons. The starter-novel freebie crowd isn't a place to be. Two, I should move my Valinthia series over to D2D no later than December. If October and November stagnates because the 1st novel is no longer free, it'll happen without hesitation. If sales start to pick up, then I may keep them where it is.

But the real question is this... one that is pondered since the start of this thread... are the readers who pay for it a better class of customer?

Another groan factor for me though... when I took the Darya series to paperback, and I designed the covers and spines hand-made, they went up over at Amazon through D2D's Createspace submission. So, grumbling, I did the match-book price thing and re-upped the Kindle versions over at Amazon, where I previously removed the Kindle titles for non-sales.

I sold some paperbacks, not many, but some. Those readers get the Kindle version for free. I don't mind that. I get a royalty somewhere, and the same paying reader gets a paper and digital copy.

At this point... if my Valinthia trilogy fails to sell until I move it to D2D, I'm pulling Murphy through the dimensional barriers with both fists, throttle him some while yelling, "What in the hell did you do to those laws you made, scumbag?"

There's something that those new to the book markets overlook, and that while the ebook market was growing so fast may have been temporarily in abeyance anyway. Once the marketing life of almost any book that could get shelf space in the first instance (which is why I insisted my books be contractually the lead titles for that month) was measured in days, not even weeks. This was determined by the requirement to cycle shelf space in bookstores. I stood in a warehouse in New Jersey once watching trucks depart for the lower 48 continental States with a pseudonymous book which was that week second on the NYT paperback list, had been no 1 and eventually sold 3m copies before it was withdrawn by the publisher for political reasons. At the other end of the warehouse a USPS truck pulled in. Harold Robbins, then a big author there for the same reason as me, to smarm up the truckies with coffee and doughnuts to drop extra boxes of our books or even put them out on shelves at stores, said, "Come see mindless waste, American style." The USPS truck brought what looked like about 10K covers torn off my paperback, returned by bookstores for refunds... The same bookstores in a few days would accept a new consignment of the same book, sell some of them, decide in days that the rest weren't selling fast enough, and rip off the covers for refunds, selling the rest of the book for pulp. It was one of the major things wrong with old-style publishing.) Indies appear to think that one or a few books is all it takes, that the book lives forever. It doesn't. Most writers who survive, write one, two or three new books every year; that is how they got to be published in the first instance. Even the big brand authors have some books that aren't reissued because there is no market for them.

The net and ebooks, by reaching previously unreachable readers (for instance the sort of people who don't even know where the public library is, or feel uncomfortable in a bookstore, and many other distinct classes out of reach to trad publishers), and creating entirely new mass audiences (the readers of porn is the most striking example, but I could make a long list), have extended the marketing window very substantially, but it hasn't made it permanent. A point must arrive where the flow of new readers available, even if the author/book can be made discoverable, stops. I don't think we're near that point yet though clearly there has been a slowdown, but Amazon possibly thinks we've reached or are fast approaching some kind of stasis, which is why suddenly they switched off the flow of free money to authors who pandered to their lowest common denominator market by switching to a length- rather than volume-based royalty payment, and switched to other means to monopolize the ebook market.

It is because of this knowledge that books are less permanent than at first they appear that experienced writers tell new entrants some version of, "The best marketing for your existing books is to publish a new book."

***
3% is a depressing conversion rate, but it is several multiples of most I've read on KB.

+1 Andre. A serious +1

You're also right about the 3%, it is a depressing conversion rate.

What got me to become an instant unbeliever in the 'first of a series is free' marketing tactic came in the guise of a friend's 20-something daughter.

She is a Science Fiction fan. Big time. I was informed that she 'purchased' my freebie Valinthia title, when it used to be free.

Her mom asks her, "Are you going to get the other two?"

"No," she easily replies. "Why should I? I've got enough free ebooks to last me decades."



That is the app her daughter uses. I never registered with that thing, I don't have any first hand knowledge about how it works. What I've been told it does, is to grab every free title in the market not owned, and using the bona-fides, buys and adds free titles to her ereader in volume. The moment a new title comes out in her favorited genre, she gets to grab it in the same manner.

"Why should I ever buy a book again?"

That was the question her mom posed to me, on her daughter's behalf. It was made to her, the mom, but that was enough for me.

There is a buffet line for freebies (like zombies after flesh, freebies are after free ebooks), an app service that scoops them up like a bulldozer while getting rich from advertising dollars, and guys like me knowing the truth of everything you talk about, Andre, and the current volumes of what could-have been but never will be in the sales department.

I heard everything you said, brother, my writing hasn't slowed down, but my gumption has gotten a severe kick in the gut when I found out about apps such as that one.

Yeah, I'm generally imperturbable. But that app is the work of the devil.