The Real Cost of the 99-Cent eBook

[Lily]

Some interesting thoughts on selling your work for 99 cents.

Wednesday April 11, 2012

The Real Cost of the 99-Cent eBook

Donna Brown

As told by a passionate book loving author promoter

I have nothing against 99-cent eBooks. I’ve bought them, I’ve read them and I appreciate that now it is easier than ever for authors to put their work out there and pricing is at an all time low. Whether books are priced $0.99, $2.99 or $4.99, it’s hardly a financial risk to try something different. When you can get 100 titles on your Kindle or Nook for a couple of hundred dollars instead of a thousand dollars, that has to be something to smile about.

However is the true cost of 99-cent eBooks all about the sales? Do they take away from higher priced authors? Or is it actually something much more insidious and sinister: do they diminish the quality perception of eBooks altogether?

I recently posted a customer review of a story I loved on Amazon. The writing was excellent, the story flowed beautifully and it was wonderful to read. It cost me five times less than a glossy magazine and was perfect alongside my morning coffee. I gave it a well deserved five stars. Unfortunately not everyone was so generous. The reviews ranged from cynical to scathing then to downright nasty.

But why? Simply put: it was not a 200-page novel but a short story. They felt like they were ripped off because they paid 99 cents for a short story; about 0.0005 cent per word! Hmm… when you look at it like that…

Amazon allows authors to upload short fiction in the form of short stories, novellas etc. The lowest price available is 99 cents regardless of length. Some works are listed for free, but only at Amazon's discretion. The author receives just 35 cents from each eBook sold for 99 cents. Once you factor in tax, marketing, writing time, formatting time, preparing or paying for a cover image, hiring an editor/proofreader and so on, an author has to sell an awful lot of copies to even make their money back. So who’s selling who short?

When authors are kind enough to share quality fiction with us, how do we respond? Not by considering that we got a great piece of writing for less than the cost of candy bar but by insulting them and making them feel that they’re ripping us off?

Drinking instant coffee at home can be just as fulfilling as the three dollar cup of coffee at the local cafe bar. We appreciate the quality, we appreciate the treat, and we appreciate the value in something we enjoy. Is it so difficult to apply the same principles to eBooks?

So, authors, I implore you: the next time you see a 99-cent short story listed for the same price as a 200 page eBook, don’t feel that you have sold yourself short. Feel lucky that there are still passionate book lovers, like me, out there that take pleasure in quality pieces of fiction. At least you've given someone the chance to try something distinctively satisfying for less than a dollar.


About the Author:
Donna Brown is a freelancer editor and also handles promotion and marketing for her husband, author David M. Brown.
www.bookdaily.com/author/1403291/david-m-brown/

She is the main contributor on their shared blog, Book Blogs and Cat Naps.
bookbagsandcatnaps.com

[Richard]

She makes some good points here.

My advice to consumers is to find out what you are getting before you buy it. That is for both hard copy or e-book.

I have no problem with selling small works if the price reflects that.

I have more of an issue with amateur writers selling non-professionally edited works for the same price, or even higher, than professionally written novels.

I have been extremely disappointed with several self-published works I've purchased recently and will make it a point to look for only professionally done work in the future. Sometimes the self-published author contributes to the criticism they receive as a whole.

Just like the most popular movies stars rate the most money, even if they are not the best actor, the popular authors rate it as well until someone can prove themselves equal. Until then, sell cheaper and build your product quality and reputation until you make it.

And more in line with the post above, if $.99 is too much to pay for a short story then go to yard sales and flea markets to buy your books.

[Lily]

Here's another take on this topic:

"Ninety-nine cent books are a complexity, and uncomfortable for me. I can accept a price difference between a "thin" book and a "thick" one, but I don't know the ideal page count that determines the price. Obviously, in print format a thick book uses more pulp product to make the pages, but there's so much more to a book than the page count. The reader who is not a writer or an editor may not appreciate that a book is more than just pages. The creative time to produce the story, long or short, is an extreme variable, but a shorter story does not always equal less creative effort on the author's part. The shorter story still requires a devoted measure of creative time, taking into account research, drafts and rewrites. It certainly does not lessen the editor's application of his/her expertise even though they may spend less time on a novella than a full blown novel.

A common pricing fault, in my estimation, is drastically reduced cover prices for e-books over print versions. The only real difference in the print product is cost of the paper and warehouse operations, encompassing, of course, the personnel necessary to accomplish such work. Electronic publication is not enough cause to reduce a twenty-five dollar print book price to six dollars. The author's work is the same, as is the editor's and the art director's. The publisher, or its distribution network, must format ebooks to satisfy several and myriad formats because there is no one standard format for electronic books. Should one e-format be priced a dollar or two more, or less, than an alternate format? That would kill the e-publishing industry. The ebook price for any one title, or size of the book, has to be uniform--but does not have to be a giveaway price in any format or page count.

Overall, the industry could and should establish standard e-prices of seventy to eighty percent of what the book would cost in paper print. But there must be a minimum price or else the publisher likely will go broke simply by the logistics of distributing wages to editors and art directors and royalties to authors. That minimum price for an ebook should be more than ninety-nine cents no matter the word or page count. Ninety-nine cents smacks of being worthless rather than a bargain. But because consumer-readers do relate size to price, the solution is that publishers should require a minimum--to be determined--word count from their authors to justify a minimum price. Two or three dollars could satisfy that minimum price, applied to a short story, but a novel of fifty thousand words and up could be justifiably priced at twelve to fifteen dollars in today's economy. Something in between, a novella, could be priced at eight or ten dollars. It's my belief that readers and book buyers will not desert us if our books are priced to reflect the effort, and the page count, that goes into them, but a cheap price means a cheap product in anyone's estimation."

Jim Woods
www.gypsyshadow.com/JimWoods.html

[Lily]

"My take on the subject is this: I spent years on my first novel. I poured time that I could have been sleeping, playing with my kids, learning another language, working a second paying job, or watching every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer into that book. I know many of the other authors on this forum did as well. In fact, I’m sure most of them did exactly that.

Naturally, it was a labor of love and I (and certainly they) would have done it even if I never made a cent. But it was a labor. Even though it came out in E-book first and there’s much less cost in one of those than there is in a print book, the work on my part was just as hard. As for Charlotte, she just recently had to force herself to take weekends off and Gypsy Shadow hasn’t yet turned a profit from her 7-day-a-week effort. This is why I disapprove of the $.99 E-book.

I worked fast food for a while. It takes 7 seconds for an experienced sandwich builder at Wendy’s to make a single with cheese, and those are up to, what, $2 now? I’ve done both, and I feel like the work I did on my book was worth more money."

Michelle John


www.gypsyshadow.com/MLJohn.html#top

[Lily]

Apr 11, 2012 21:36:14 GMT -5 Lily said:

I worked fast food for a while. It takes 7 seconds for an experienced sandwich builder at Wendy’s to make a single with cheese, and those are up to, what, $2 now? I’ve done both, and I feel like the work I did on my book was worth more money."

I second that.

[Lily]

More input from authors

"Pricing any product or service can be a difficult thing. Consider real estate. It's easy to knock a price down, but you can't decide that you've under priced the property and now you want to raise it. If the eBook industry sells eBooks at 99 cents, in what direction can we go from there? If 99 cents becomes the norm and suddenly we realize our error and we want to shoot prices up like gasoline, we'll have trouble. We'll tolerate rising gas prices (up to a point) but will we tolerate a sudden rise in eBooks? It's too easy to log off and potential buyers might do just that.

I believe that 99 cent eBooks are a bad idea for the industry. As a writer, I feel my work has value, even though I'm not trying to make a living at it (I'm retired and in the slow lane). I learned in Marketing 101 a LONG time ago that if a product is priced too low, people will believe it is of low value (cheap as opposed to inexpensive) and not buy it. Our work is not cheap."

Steve Marini
Cape Cod.
www.blogger.com/profile/10429455576227864891