e-book pricing
Fri, 12/18/2009 - 14:34
My best friend just wrapped up her piece for an e-book. How should she go with the pricing of the book? Does the genre matter?
My best friend just wrapped up her piece for an e-book. How should she go with the pricing of the book? Does the genre matter?
Hi Julie.
As an eBook publisher and promoter, we have to look at the market and value of the book, not just the cost of production. Consumers who are buying eBooks expect that there will be a significant difference between the cost of getting electronic bits and getting a bound paper book. On the day that Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" was published for $28 in hardcover, I bought the eBook for $10.
But Dan Brown has a reputation and is a multi-million best-seller. As an independent, and unknown author, your audience may be willing to risk $5 at most. Even that depends on how long the book is and whether I think the sample or excerpt merits my spending that much on the risk of an author that I may not read again.
The good news is that authors publishing eBooks, either through commercial publishers or private publishers, get a much higher percentage of the revenue than they could ever hope for in print books. So believe me when I say that selling 100 copies at $5 a book is much more profitable than selling 0 copies at $10 a book. And if you could sell 1000 copies at $2.50 a book, you are way ahead. Just remember that selling a million copies at $0 per book is the same as selling 0 at $10.