Variable eBook Pricing: The Good, the Bad & the Unsold

The price of your ebook does make a difference. When selling on Amazon, many authors know there’s a $9.99 ceiling if they want to keep a larger share of the profits from sales; however, is there ever cause to go above this? And what about all the authors selling titles for $.99?

While there is definitely evidence to show that initially pricing content low can bring in curious readers who don’t feel as if $.99 is a bad price to pay for a book, even if it turns out to be not quite what they’re looking for, the low pricing scheme can also turn away readers, who are beginning to grow savvy to the fact that some low-priced content is actually only worth the $.99 price tag.

That means authors must walk a fine line between pricing their work low enough to draw attention and interest but also high enough to proclaim that the work has value.

Visitors to the Amazon Kindle eBook page received a nice surprise the other day: the retailing giant unveiled a limited-time Amazon Sunshine promotion, where publishers designated some backlist titles for sale at $.99, $1.99 and $2.99. Will variable pricing come down the road? –via Amazon unveils Sunshine eBooks; will lower prices or variable pricing come next?.

Enter variable pricing. At this time, no online retailer appears to have the technology to track sales in a way that will allow for variable pricing schemes; however, this may only be a matter of time. Variable pricing would allow for a shifting price point based on how well sales are doing. If a book isn’t selling well, the price would go down to bring in more readers. If the book begins to do well, the price would go up. Since there are a number of popular titles selling for more than Amazon’s recommended $9.99 price point that are selling very well, this means that readers are not adverse to paying almost as much for their ebooks as they are for their print counterparts; however–and we can’t stress this enough–the investment of both content and design for such books must include the same level of quality that would be invested in a print version. Don’t expect readers to pay $12.99 for a book you didn’t bother to edit or design professionally. (We’ve seen it before, and it’s never a pretty sight.) Readers can be brutal, and once you’ve stumbled into the land of bad reviews, it’s very hard to regain your footing.

We think variable pricing could be a great way to automate the pricing process based on sales, but certainly the technology would have to be accurate in keeping track of how well a title is doing. For now, authors might want to consider implementing this tactic manually by keeping track of sales and adjusting the price of a book based on how well it’s doing. See what happens! You might be surprised.

In the News…

• Which e-reader should I buy? - San Jose Mercury News
  Published: June 6, 2011
  eBookdesigns: Are we the only ones who think that comparing the Color Nook to the iPad is ridiculous? The heavy, clunky, somewhat awkward Nook, with its very small selection of apps, and failure to connect to the Android market, smaller screen, smaller processor and less on board memory, no 3G.... Need we go on? But, it does run Flash. And it's much cheaper. And it isn't owned by Apple. We can at least say that for it.
• Kindle battery life doubles overnight - CNET (blog)
  Published: May 25, 2011
  eBookdesigns: In answer to the release of the new Barnes & Noble Nook, which boasts a batter life of 2 months, the Kindle magically increased its battery life to the same nearly overnight. So did they actually change the battery? No, they simply took issue with how B&N was calculating battery life and added a note that stated under what conditions of use you could get the Kindle to last two months as well. Oh, these crazy kids!