Personally, I set my price point to 30-35% the retail cost of the soft cover book. I have one free book and several $.99 works but those books are either under 10,000 words or excertps. Anything under 10,000 words is fair to price at $.99.
However, if your work is over 10,000 words you're selling yourself short (literally) to allow Amazon to rip you off paying you 30%. As I stated, I am selling a few books in the $.99 range to get new readers but those books are only excerpts of a more expensive book.
What I've found, is that I garner more readers by advertising and word of mouth than by the droves of people buying my cheap or free ebooks. This is because as the attached artcle suggests, the market is spliting as follows:
- Readers who only buy free books
- Readers who only buy books for $.99 or less
- Readers who don't buy books for $.99
- Readers who buy books at any price
The $.99 crowd is looking to get books cheap or free. In fact, I had a reader give me a review of my book, I'm at it again...', which gives three 10,000 word previews of my next three books, who had the complete and utter audacity to complain because I didn't offer it for free even though they enjoyed it. The x amount of time that my work entertains a reader has a dollar value associated with it.
I don't need or want readers like that.
My ebooks contain 30-40% more words than my competion and are enhanced with video, links and color pictures and now that the Kindle Fire will handle HTML 4, my upcoming books will be fully enhanced included audio.
This will allow my readers on the iPad, iPhone, Kindle Fire, Google, and ePub readers an expanded and longer user experience.
What's going to occur as this market shakes out is that savy publishers and indies who are not giving away their work will enhance thier titles to support thier price points over $.99.
This will distingush and seperate low price point selling indies from more expensive products on much more than just editing and professional artwork. The gap between both tiers of products will be glaringly apparant because cheap selling indies will not have the resources to compete in the "enhanced ebook" market.
With this logical seperation of product, the Kobo's, Barnes & Nobles etc will probably even differenciate regular ebooks from enhanced ebooks in the very near future.
So there is no need for authors who are not giving thier books away to get upset with publishers in the $.99 crowd because readers will...get...what they pay for.
Following is the article that inspired me to go on this rant:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/20/ebooks-cheap-price_n_1160383.html?re...
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