Price

Again, you will hear everything about this.  There are people who sell well who advise to keep the prices up.  There are those who say price is flexible.  There are those who say 99 cents.  That's our side.

There are readers who say loudly, definitively, that any book under $2.99 is crap.  A 99 cent book is by a wannabe and not worth the time.  There are those who think 99 is right.  There are a substantial number who think free is the perfect price and paying for books is stupid.

Let me say that those people insisting books should cost at least $2.99 did not support me in my decision to increase my prices at the beginning of the year.

You are looking to the wrong person to do the math of this but here's my sense of it not based on math.  Your royalty is 70% on a book priced at >$2.99 at Amazon.  You can sell 1 book instead of 5 (whatever, someone else can do the math and tell me how many 35 centses that works out to be).  Isn't that great?!

Say you sell 10 books at $2.99 in the month.  Say you sell enough 99 cent books to end up with the same royalty check.  Which one leaves you better off?  Tick tock. I'll give you a moment to think about it.  That's right, the 99 cent sales because it  means you've sold a bunch of books and your ranking will improve.  You will be seen and at least have the chance for people to check out your other books.

At 99 cents, as I've said for months, the drunk trolls come out of their burrows and slam you mercilessly with their 1 star reviews--"I wish I had my money back!  Bad writing!  No character development!"

Or a real 1 star review for Dream Horse this past week at BN

• Anonymous
  Posted January 18, 2012

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Yeah I flagged it but there's no one home at BN to do anything about it.

So what do I say?  Play around with your pricing.  If you're not seeing sales, raise or drop.  For how long?   For as long as you're comfortable with it.  I saw one woman say she was keeping the test price point for 3 months.  Wow.  That's a long time in the digital world.  If you can't get a sense in a month, good for you.  You're not obsessing about it.

I do know that over the weekend I lowered my prices and saw an improvement in sales at BN within hours making me sorry I had taken Bad Apple 1 away from the site to give Kindle Select a whirl.  However, let me just say that it was free at BN in Nov. and downloaded 500 times with no bump in sales of 2 & 3.  So I'm not feeling the love.

This is all leading somewhere.  Trust me.