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Price Ranges

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I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. In this week’s blog posts I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

More than once in my life I’ve had someone tell me they would like to own ItemX. When I asked how much ItemX cost, however, the person replied with, “I don’t know.”

Now, it’s not very often in our commercially saturated lives that we encounter a product which is outside our pricing experience. And that’s particularly true if we know enough about the product to know we want it. Which is why, when this scenario unfolds before me, I invariably respond like this: “Is it a dollar? A million dollars? Ten dollars? A hundred dollars? Ten hundred millions dollars?” And on and on, until the person calmly replies that one of those numbers is close to the mark.  [ Read more ]

The iTunes Pricing Model

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I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. In this week’s blog posts I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

In the comments to my initial post on this subject, Will Entrekin talked in part about pricing his own content using what he called the iTunes model:

When I first published my collection, I used what I called the iTunes model: I priced the flash fiction at 99 cents, the short stories and essays at $1.99, the poetry as an EP (5 or 6) at $4.99, and then the collection at $9.99.

As I noted in my response, for a while I’ve been subconsciously thinking about the idea that 1 short story = $1. I don’t know that twelve short stories necessarily compels or justifies a $12 price for the whole collection I want to publish, but I can see selling individual stories at $1 each and feeling as if that’s somehow fair. (I use the word ‘fair’ here in the naive humanistic sense, not in the savvy cannibalistic marketing sense. Obviously a product is worth whatever you can get for it, and any sale justifies whatever lies you need to tell or relevant information you need to withhold in order to induce that transaction.)

One practical problem with selling individual stories for $1 is the difficulty of providing a sample by which the reader can judge your authorial skill. I’m not saying that each story should be partially revealed, but I do think that readers deserve some reassurance that you can execute a story from beginning to end. My intent with the collection was to make some percentage available for preview, but to sell the entire collection for one price. (I’m not sure of the mechanics of this, but that’s the idea.)

If I were also to sell each of the the twelve stories as singles for $1 each, it seems at first blush as if the sample portion I was giving away should also be available for free. Yet the more I think about it the more I don’t think I would do that. I would still make the sample available relative to the collection, but if you wanted to purchase the sample as a distinct piece of content I think it would be sold at the same $1 per-story price.

Does that seem incongruous? In a weird way I think it actually makes sense, but maybe I’ve already become deluded about these issues.

In any case, I think there’s much to recommend the idea of a collection of short stories being sold like an album of songs. To the extent that the mediums are different, making the analogy less than perfect, I agree. But in terms of practical solutions it seems like a workable idea, and one that’s already being demonstrated in a similar market.

— Mark Barrett

Pricing Wolf Parts

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I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. In this week’s blog posts I’m trying to work through relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

On Twitter yesterday @leadigloo pointed me to Matt Bell’s Wolf Parts web page, where Matt talks about the sale and price of his upcoming book by that same name:

…this edition of Wolf Parts will only be available to people who pre-order the book before its print date of March 21, 2010. The book costs $8 (with free shipping), for which you’ll receive the perfect-bound minibook, plus an audiobook version that you’ll be able to download immediately upon completion of your order. As an added bonus, you’ll also receive an e-coupon for $3 off my full-length collection How They Were Found when it becomes available for pre-order later this year, sometime before its October release.

Now, obviously there’s a lot of stuff here in this limited-time offer: a perfect-bound minibook, an audiobook and a $3 coupon off the price of another book. Embarrassingly, I have to admit that I have no idea what a ‘pefect-bound minibook’ is, so I’m going to have to look that up. I was also a bit confused by some of the details, but Matt added an explanatory note:

Basically, if you order Wolf Parts during the next three weeks–the only time it will be available for purchase online–you’ll receive the audiobook immediately, the print minibook in early April, and, should you later choose to order How They Were Found directly from Keyhole, you’ll get that book for just $11 (instead of the usual $14), plus some pre-order bonuses for that book that we’re not ready to talk about yet.

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Pricing A Short Story Collection

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I am in the process of readying a collection of short stories for online publication. The stories are literary, and focus on one character (a young boy) over the course of a year. I hope readers connect with these stories emotionally. If not, I failed to hit what I was aiming at.

I will be posting the collection first on Smashwords. I have decided that I will not be posting the collection for free, but rather will be setting a price. I do intend to allow readers to sample the collection to demonstrate that I can, at the very least, carry a tune.

The question before me now is what the price should be. It’s a question everyone is wrestling with, so I don’t feel alone in my consternation. Whatever your feelings about the fluctuating price of gasoline over the past few years, at least there’s a constantly-updated market price for that product. If I was trying to unload a gallon of gas right now I’d know where I stand. Twelve literary short stories? Not so much.  [ Read more ]

The Empire Strikes Back

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Whatever else may be happening in the book business these days, it’s now clear that the publishing industry has decided to fight back on the fundamental issue of pricing its products. It’s also clear that this is a concerted effort, as against the general aimless flailing demonstrated over the previous six months.

After a protracted price decline took hold last fall and accelerated toward the holiday season, the core issue of product pricing came to a head at the end of January when Amazon pulled Macmillan’s titles from its site rather than agree to Macmillan’s demand that e-book prices be raised. (Amazon has an interest in keeping e-book prices low because it spurs demand for Amazon’s e-reader, the Kindle.)

Despite Amazon’s large customer base and beloved-brand status, after only a few short hours people began excising Amazon’s dead links from the consumer loop and pointing those links to other sites carrying Macmillan’s products. Demonstrating once again the shallow loyalty of online associations, as well as the vast difference between hosting and controlling a social network, Amazon was also reminded that even though it is (or rather was; more on this in a moment) one of the publishing industry’s biggest wholesale customers, from the point of view of the end user it’s just another easily replaced retailer. (Because of its Kindle e-reader Amazon is also a direct competitor for publishing dollars, further weakening the publishing industry’s interest in supporting Amazon’s pricing decisions.)

Sufficiently humbled by the experience, Amazon relented, providing everyone an opportunity to draw the wrong conclusions about who won and who lost even though the jury is still out. The only issue that was settled was the question of who will be calling the shots on pricing. Whether those prices will be met or rejected by consumers remains undecided, and it remains the obvious basis on which other interested parties can attempt to compete.  [ Read more ]

Professionalism and Price

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In yesterday’s post I made the case for my own rejection of the free/freemium content-pricing model, as well as the celebrity-first marketing model that seems to be its genetic twin. In a nutshell, the idea of giving away content in order to get people to care about me so I can monetize affection on the back end is not what I’m interested in doing. Were I the kind of writer who also wants to be a celebrity I could see the utility and appeal of that approach, but I’m not that kind of person. There’s nothing in me that wants to be on stage in a spotlight, and there never has been.

This leaves me with two choices. If conventional wisdom is right, and celebrity is a critical component of any writer’s ability to make a living, then I need to quit writing and do something else. The only alternative is the contrarian view that content in and of itself still does have some value in the marketplace. Because I tend to come by contrariness honestly, that’s the path I intend to follow.

If I’m right and conventional wisdom is wrong, then I’m effectively buying the content-first model at a discount. Later, when everybody realizes that celebrity is simply another endlessly-available, valueless commodity that they will have to root, grunt, scratch, claw and eternally fight for, I can leverage resurgent interest in non-celebrity content (formerly known as ‘entertainment’ or ‘knowledge’) and make a killing. Or something like that.

Obviously, the trendy idea that information or content has no inherent value rests on the bedrock premise of the internet as an free and open information pipeline servicing a world-wide society of hackers, spammers, pirates, griefers and anonymous cranks, as well as sundry meeker citizens. And I have no problem with that. I don’t think the internet should be regulated, or that people should be forced to give up their anonymity in order to join ongoing cultural conversations. If quality really doesn’t matter any more simply because there’s so much quantity, I can live with that.

However…it’s hard not to notice that comments about the ubiquity of internet content often dovetail with comments about the general lack of quality, value, merit, meaning or worth in that same infinite stream of words and ideas. And here I’m not talking about the difficulty of finding the good stuff. Rather, I’m saying that most of the stuff that’s out there is just plain bad not by my measure, but by anyone’s measure.  [ Read more ]

Doctorow, Anderson and Godin, Oh My

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Six months ago, when I first opened up shop here at Ditchwalk, there was a riot brewing in the publishing marketplace. For all the back-and-forth about self-publishing versus traditional publishing, however, the rhetorical clash that eventually broke out last fall was never really an us-against-them-whoever-they-are revolution. Or if it was, it was only that for a few short weeks, until the industry forces manning the status-quo battlements got their mind around the fact that the internet wasn’t going to go away no matter how many ruby-slippered heel clicks they threw at the damned thing.

What really drove the chaos last fall is what drives chaos in any business. Suddenly, with only a fleeting decade’s warning, the book business didn’t now how to make a stable profit. The internet was the obvious scapegoat, at least until the recession took hold, at which point big names in the publishing business reassured the rabble that everything would be fine as soon as the recession was over.

Now, when a pricing plague strikes your village and the experts fail to stop the spread, and Aunt Sadie’s home recipes don’t work, and your prayers don’t save the people you love, there’s a natural tendency to latch on to anyone who comes by with a possible solution. Fortunately, the one thing you can always count on in such situations is that someone will come by.  [ Read more ]

Professionalism and Quality

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After my weekend ride I spent most of Sunday catching up on non-writing news. Try as I might, however, I couldn’t stopping thinking about professionalism and amateurism, and whether there was any useful distinction between the two. As noted in previous posts, the corporate book business insists that amateurs cannot produce works of commercial quality or literary merit because amateurs are inherently unqualified to do so. But is that right? Is professionalism — whatever that word means — an inherent arbiter of quality?

I found myself thinking about that question while I read a New York Times piece on Toyota’s implosion as a brand synonymous with quality. While I already knew about the problems with the Pruis and runaway acceleration, I wasn’t surprised to run across this as well:

It also said it had avoided an investigation into the Tacoma, a pickup whose undercarriage could be affected by rust. Toyota offered to repair or, in some cases, replace damaged Tacomas built from 1995 to 2004. Toyota also said it had saved millions of dollars by delaying federal safety rules affecting other models.

Years ago I made enough money on a screenplay gig to buy myself the first new vehicle I’d ever owned. I took a long time picking it out, paying particular attention to ratings for quality as well as my all-season needs in the (then) upper-Midwest. The vehicle I settled on was a Nissan Pathfinder, which served me faithfully for close to a decade.

At which point the frame disintegrated:

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We’re All Amateurs Now

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I took a long ride on Metaphor (my imaginary horse) over the weekend, wandering more than aiming for anything in particular. On Saturday night we ended up in a little seaside town that would have been intolerable during tourist season, but was welcoming and sheltering in the windy gray of February.

After boarding Metaphor at the local stable just down the street from my hotel, I walked along the block-long main street, looking at the various storefronts and window displays. On the upwind leg I found the usual knick-knack shops and t-shirt shops, along with the local office of a national real estate brokerage, and the local office of a nationwide bank where you used to be able to borrow money to buy local real estate. On the downwind leg I surveyed the menus for fancy eateries — both promising to open again when people flew north for the summer — and one take-out joint that looked like it had died. There was a dentist’s office up a side alley, and a closed ice cream store that sold hand-packed and soft-serve, which seemed like both a commitment to customer service and a failure to commit at the same time.

And then I came across a gallery, and it was open.  [ Read more ]

Taking Stock: Ditchwalk at Six Months

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Six months ago I put up my first post on this blog. My goals at the time were pretty straightforward:

  • Re-establish an internet presence for myself as a writer. I had a professional web site for years that was devoted to my interactive work. I took it down when I stepped back from interactive in the middle of the 90’s. (Blog posts and documents from that site have been added to Ditchwalk, and can be located via the Archive and Docs tabs on the main nav.)
  • Investigate the (r)evolution taking place in publishing, how the self-publishing/online movement is impacting traditional publishing, and any opportunities this presents.
  • Get up to speed on the new wave of social networking tools. In a few short years, online forums and e-mail groups were out, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter were in.
  • Get up to speed on new tech, including e-readers, online publishing sites, self-publishing service providers, and print-on-demand (POD) technology.
  • Get up to speed on issues facing writers and storytellers in this brave new world. (Google’s deal with the Authors Guild quickly caught my eye.)
  • Identify opinion leaders and stress-test their opinions.
  • Network with others who share any or all of these interests.

Six months later I feel good about what I’ve learned and accomplished. There’s more I want to do, and more I need to know, but today I feel as if I’m on the crest of the breaking publishing wave rather than paddling behind it.  [ Read more ]