Sunday, October 11, 2015
Question, if I were to raise some of my prices, would it affect your purchases?
I see a lot of people charging 4.99 and up, for books the same size, or even shorter than what I write.
Now with the exception of one book (which is over 170K words) all of my stuff is priced at 3.99 or less.
If I raised the prices on my 3.99 books to 4.99, would that affect your buying my books? Would you not have bought them? Would you stop buying them?
These are important questions to me, because this is what I do for a living, and I'm always wondering if I'm charging too little, when I see higher prices on other authors. I a also afraid of charging too much. for me, I see 4.99 as a lot for an ebook, but then I started out when even 3.99 was considered a lot for a self published author to charge.
Honestly, I've even thought about getting my stuff printed in lots, to bring the paperback price down, just to see if I could lower the price of my print books, which are already a lot cheaper than anything comparable in print. I just don't think the upfront investment would be worth it. Setting price points is tough as an independent. I want to offer a good value to my readers, but I need to eat and keep a roof over my head as well.
So please, let me know.
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I wouldn't mind you raising the prices by that much. 5$ for a 300 page book is okay for me.
ReplyDeleteThen again i'm spending hundreds of € (I'm from europe) a year on ebooks anyway.
Strangely enough your books are more expensive here at around 4.27€ each.
I don't mind spending a bit of money on good books. I alyways hope it's an incentive for the authors to write more, so i get the next book faster :-D I even go and buy books i read with Kindle unlimited, if i liked them, to support the authors.
As for the printed books, I became a big fan of ebooks because i always have them on me (reading on the smart phone) which i can't do with printed books.
Did you think about doing preorders for the new books to know how many you'll need at the beginning? That way you could maybe save a few bucks by printing in bulk.
The reason that the books are so expensive in Europe, was that at the beginning of the year, the EU raised the VAT taxes on eBooks by an ENORMOUS amount. I would suggest buying them from the French Amazon store (if you can convince it to sell to you) because France has the lowest tax on books/ebooks in the EU.
ReplyDeleteThe actual rates per country are:
UK 20%
DE 19%
FR 5.5%
ES 21%
IT 21%
NL 21%
I can tell from what you're paying, that you're buying from the DE (Germany) store. In France that would be 3.79€ instead. I do also check currency rates a few times a year, as the dollar gets stronger, prices come down as well. Amazon used to do all of this automagically, but when the EU hiked taxes at the beginning of the year, they stopped doing it, so now authors have to do all these conversions by themselves.
I'm probably not the best person to ask this since I read all your books via kindle unlimited. Although here in the UK, your books cost around £3.11 which isn't bad and if it moved closer to £4 then I don't imagine people would be discouraged in buying it IMO. For a series I prefer it if authors make their first book cheaper than the rest of the series, like what you have done. If they like your first book then they will likely buy the rest. I honestly think you should go for it, although make sure you put it on Amazon kindle :D.
ReplyDeleteAt this point it wouldn't effect my buying your books since I enjoy them and want to support the author.
ReplyDeleteBefore I had purchased any of your books it might have been enough to convince me not to purchase.
It's hard to say how having the first few books at a lower price would effect my purchasing decision. I know I've dropped several series due to the sudden jump in price and not enjoying the series enough to justify continuing to purchase.
Other series I continue to purchase despite the price increase because I enjoy them and I expect to continue to enjoy them. Others I've switched to Kindle Unlimited for due to the price increase.
Well, at this point, I'm only going to take novels that are over 80~85K words and maybe put them at the 4.99 price. I did move my COS novel back up to 5.99 (which was the original price when I first put it out) because that's over 175K words long (yeah, it's huge).
ReplyDeleteI'm going to leave the first book in the POI series at 2.99 (might even put it on sale for a week here soon as well), and I think I'm going to move a couple of others down to 2.99 as well, mainly books that are entry points to 'new' story-lines/worlds.
If I had the kind of sales that authors dream about, I'd probably make 3.99 my top price, but sadly I'm not that famous.
After reading your books and enjoying them all I would still buy your books if they cost 5$ or more and count it as a good deal.
ReplyDeleteI've read all your books and haven't been dissapointed yet. I don't think 4 or 5 bucks is unreasonable for novel-length books.
ReplyDeleteWhen purchasing a book anything $3.99 and under I will purchase on a whim (unless it's really short under 200 pages). Once you go higher than that then I start looking at other factors.
ReplyDeleteOne question I have since I know you allow your books on Kindle Unlimited. If I read them on KU and then later purchase them do you get payed twice or does Amazon take your KU money back?
I run my purchases by page count. My top 5 percent or so of authors get a free pass to charge whatever they want. After that I'm pretty much always happy with 1 cent/page and as quality improves I am happy to move to about 1.4-1.5 cents per page. I will occasionally go up to 2 cents per page for a series I am already committed to and currently binge read for the latest current book - but that often means that when the next book is published at a similar price I either don't return to the series or look for alternate methods of obtaining it unless it's REALLY good. Also I tend not to bother looking as closely at books under the 200 page mark and will more strongly consider books over 350 pages - and that is before I look at the pricing.
ReplyDeleteSomething to look at may be the sale/comment numbers on the higher and lower priced ebooks. They may charge more but have lower sales. Also I have noticed that the expected quality rises with price therefore star ratings of similar books are lower at a higher price.
ReplyDeleteHope this helps :)