Speaking of mood swings and mental instability, here’s another post about my books – with a totally different perspective from the last one. After reading a post about the results another author has had with experimental pricing, and considering the matter, generally and in terms of my recent frustrations, I’ve decided to try a similar pricing scheme. So, at least for the remainder of the summer, the eBook versions of my books will no longer be priced according to parity of margins.
I’ve reduced the price of the Kinde versions of all my eBooks, and then all the Smashwords versions of my eBooks, to under $2 each. Forget What You Can’t Remember & Lost and Not Found, for only $1.99 each. Dragons’ Truth & More Lost Memories for only $1.75 each. And on the Kindle, each of the first three books of the Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction – Recollections of an Alternate Past series for only $1.50 each.
The Kindle versions, of course, can only be read on the Kindle. Sorry. The versions at Smashwords can be read on most any device – your PC’s browser or word processor (.txt, .rtf, & .pdf), the Kindle and other Mobipocket-compatible eReaders, Palm devices (.pdb), Sony eReaders (.lrf, etc.), iPhone/iPodTouch (via Stanza)… pretty much anything. And yes, for reasons I’ve stated clearly before, there are still free versions available for those of you who either 1) can’t afford to pay and/or 2) refuse to pay.
This is an experiment. Tell your friends. Twitter about it. Link to it. Set up an affiliate account at Smashwords & take a cut of every sub-$2 sale. ($0.15 here, $0.18 there, repeat hundreds or thousands of times & it adds up!) Copy it. Compete with it. Blog about how you think I’m devaluing my content. Blog about how you think I’m building my reader base. Blog about how you think Amazon’s 65% cut is terrible and I’m a fool for even publishing a kindle version. Or ignore it. If unit sales increase over the next couple of months, which is what I’m hoping for, great! I’ll keep the prices low. (Sub-$2 low? Maybe…) If, by the end of the summer, unit sales haven’t changed (or haven’t changed enough that my significantly lower per-eBook take gets close to my current -relatively low- sales numbers), I’ll put them back up. Maybe put them up to a $9.99 price point & see if “fitting in” increases sales. Maybe split the difference.
So give one (or all) of my books a try. The prices are low enough that it’s worth the risk of not liking my writing – but if you like to think, I think you’ll like my books.
Update: In super news, it looks like Amazon updated the list prices of my books without updating the actual “kindle prices”… ie:
No idea if/when they’ll get this corrected, but I’ll keep an eye on it. Theoretically, this means that if you buy one of my books for your kindle right now, you pay ~$7 and I get ~$0.60. Wheee!