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Book Price Research

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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.

If you’re bringing your first crop of parsnips to market, at some point you find out what everybody else is getting for their parsnips. Maybe you randomly phone-check prices in several locations, or maybe you do insanely-thorough research down to the type of parsnip sold, the number sold and the time, date and weather conditions of each sale, but in the end the idea is the same: you try to figure out what your parsnips are worth based on what other parsnip growers are getting paid.

As noted in yesterday’s post, I’m not a big book buyer, so I don’t have a lot of real-world experience to draw from in pricing a short story collection. From the reading I’ve done over the past six months or so I’ve learned something about the price ranges for publishing products, with the emphasis on general, but I don’t know much beyond that. So doing a little product research seemed like both the obvious and easy way to go in resolving my pricing questions.  [ Read more ]

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 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 ]

Publishing: The New Math

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Here’s a quote from a piece on e-publishing, titled (provocatively) Why Ebooks Must Fail:

And therein lies the dilemma… how does the publishing industry fund the creation, editing, design, production, marketing, e-warehousing, and sales of ebooks, if the income isn’t there? How do ebooks cover the huge advances needed to buy books if we cannot generate the cash, especially at their extremely low, discounted prices, cover the advances that an entire industry has come to require? The answer is that ebooks, alone, cannot.

Given the assumptions, I can’t really disagree. But the assumptions aren’t a given.  [ Read more ]