May
2014
Pricing Yourself Out of the Market
I recently friended an author I enjoy on Facebook. While checking out her page to see if there is news of new books in the future, I saw someone asking her to lower the price on her book since this fan found the price too high. To help everyone understand the argument, the book was priced at $4.99 on Amazon. It’s 55K words, or roughly 150 pages. In my personal opinion that isn’t too high. But the comment brought about an interesting debate. How high is too high for ebooks?
As a reader I know that there are books or publishers I won’t buy because the price of the ebook is too high for what I get. I will never buy an ebook for more than $8.00 (US). I don’t care how long the book is, or who the author is. Any more than that then it’s not worth it to me.
If I’m buying a book from a brand new author, I have a hard time spending more than $5.00 since I don’t know if I’ll like the author’s writing style or not. I’m more likely to buy a short story or something that isn’t my first choice of book for a lower price.
There have been some times recently where I’ve passed on a book by authors I already enjoy because the cost per page is too high for me. It’s always been on short stories and novellas. But in every one of those instances, the price was set by the publisher.
As an author, have you ever said something to your publisher that you think the price for your book is too high? Or too low even?
I’m very interested to hear what others think; both readers and authors.
I have told my publisher that I think the price on the novel and novellas I have with them are too high and that is why they sell like such crap. They told me they know better than I do what sells and that they have to earn their money out of the books they invested in with me. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at that since at that point I had a self-pub book in the top five of the relevant genre list at Amazon and was making a great deal more money on it than they’d ever made on the books I had with them. Yes, obviously, I know nothing about pricing, publishing-house-I’ll-never-sub-to-again.
Thank you for sharing your experience Leta. I find it interesting that some publishers won’t bend on pricing. I get that it’s easier to have set prices for books based on length and genre. But if something isn’t selling well, I don’t see how dropping the price would hurt. They get no money if there’s no sales.