Ebook Pricing Wars: Episode 1,209,843

Zoe Winters wrote a thoughtful and reasoned post on ebook pricing the other day that's worth the read for all you indie publishers struggling with the pricing question. An excerpt:

I am bolding this next part because if you don’t hear any of the rest of this, please hear this:

99 cent and free ebooks are not glutting the ebook market. They are glutting the BARGAIN ebook market.

If you are selling to that market or you are a reader in that market, it’s very easy to imagine it’s the only market and OMG we all have to price at 99 cents because other people are MAKING US with their low-priced ebooks.

Not so.

My own experience corroborates Zoe here. I almost fell into this trap last year when I considered tinkering with the price of my fantasy novel, THE LAST KEY.

Should I go high or should I go low?

If I go high, I thought, why would anyone pay $4.99 for my book with all the 99-cent/free books out there?

But then I wondered, If I go low, how would anyone notice my book with all the 99-cent/free books out there?

I decided to go high and priced THE LAST KEY at $4.99 (a common price-point for novels with 75,000+ words). Since I did that in December, my sales rates have...stayed the same.

And that's good. It means I'm getting the same number of sales and making more money than when the book was priced lower. I may not be tapping into the BARGAIN market, but I am getting noticed by a different market. I like to think it's the LOVERS OF HIGH QUALITY FANTASY market...

Originally posted at Quarkfolio by Rob Steiner.

Stigma Erased

It is done.

The stigma of self-publishing has been slowly subsiding for the last couple of years, but this year its demise has accelerated. And today I can say with certainty that it doesn't mean a damn thing anymore.

Amanda Hocking, Jeremy Robinson and Zoe Winters are just a few authors that have had tremendous success with indie sales. A couple of months ago, Ms. Hocking used her indie success to land a deal with a big publisher. Apparently, they didn't mind how she sold her books. Joe Konrath, a successful traditionally published author, went indie and has had tremendous success. Barry Eisler, another best-selling traditionally published author, spurned a deal from St. Martin's Press to go indie.

And the names keep coming.

Earlier this week, Amazon announced that indie author John Locke sold 1 million ebooks on the Kindle in 2011. Take a few seconds to absorb that one. 1 million. That's hundreds of thousands of people who didn't care one iota that this guy published his books on his own without an agent or a big publishing house to back him.

Wired UK reported today that J.K. Rowling is going to self-publish the Harry Potter series. In essence, indie publishing has been blessed as acceptable by one of the most successful authors of all time.

Traditional publishing purists may continue to sneer with contempt at indie authors, but they can pretty much go stuff themselves because no one cares anymore. Readers don't care how books come to market so long as they're entertained. They don't need any self-appointed "gatekeepers" (nannies of literature, if you will) to tell them what's OK to read because the Readers can figure it out on their own. Or they'll ask their friends. Or they'll read reviews on blogs or booksellers' sites. Readers want to read what they want to read! And that's all that matters.

We Have All Had This Conversation

I saw this over at the POD People blog this morning and I just had to share.



Hats off to Zoe Winters for perfectly encapsulating the debate.

\_/
DED

Self-publishing symposium: Zoe Winters

I can't address everything because my post would get to "ZOMG spork your eyeballs out long" but I think the primary reason that we have yet to have a "name" come out of self-publishing itself instead of after a mainstream publisher backed them is because the stigma of self-publishing has made it such that most SP authors seem to want to "get out of" SP. It's a means to an end for them.

I think this is all a mental block more than anything. There is nothing about publishing as a business model that makes it such that you can't create something that catches on and set up the business infrastructure to handle that success.

While that's not necessarily a bad thing for authors to take a deal, I think it helps to reinforce the stereotype that SP isn't a sustainable business model on it's own. And I believe that it is. When you do the math for 10 years out with 10 books in your backlist, there is a legitimate possibility of someone 'breaking out' in some way AS an SP author without even needing an outside publisher in the equation at all.

I think it takes someone (or several someones) truly committed to the business of SP itself, who can build each success on top of the previous smaller successes. But I think once someone does it, we'll start to see a lot of other someones do it. Because the game totally changes once a possibility opens up after someone has proven something can be done. (Like the guy that broke the 4 minute mile, after he did it a whole bunch of other people did it the next year.)

After a point, if the readership is out there, it's not that you CAN'T get it without a major publisher, you just have to find a way to reach your peeps. And you have to have some business sense and know how to reinvest to get your name out there further.

And I think the best days of SP are ahead of us. I also believe that as we go more and more to Ebooks and Ereaders that there is going to be less of an idea that you can "only" do the big stuff "with" a big publisher.

Because most publishers are not interfacing all that splendidly with the e-world. They don't have giant online presence. The Internet is the Internet and if we're on the Internet an SPer who knows how to market and get their name out there doesn't need a publisher in the online world. They just need to know how to build their platform.

The publisher therefore becomes a middle man.

 

Zoe Winters writes at zoewinters.org