book pricing

Quick Links: How Indie Authors Should Price a Book for Optimal Success

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

How do you decide the right price for your book? Too little and you risk not making any money and also possibly turning some audience away. Too much and you definitely risk turning people away. Over at Digital Book World, shares her tips on book pricing.

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How Indie Authors Should Price a Book for Optimal Success

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Best Price GuaranteedSometimes the simplest thing you can do to give your book a boost is play around with the pricing.

It’s one thing to have a book, but it’s quite another to have one that actually sells. You have probably heard this from other indie authors, or even experienced it yourself. Your book gets added to Amazon, full of pomp and circumstance, and then, nothing.

It’s disheartening to see your hard work just sit there. But here’s the good news: this might be an easy fix.

How you price your book is something we don’t often think of as a trigger for book promotion or how to sell more books, but it is. First, let’s look at two important factors. Your book’s perceived value vs. the going market rate.

Look at other books. First and foremost, see what others are charging in your market. You may be surprised by what you find. It’s never a good idea to price your book outside of what the market can bear, even if you toiled over the book, worked endlessly, lost sleep, etc.

My book is worth more! Yes, I know. Your book is worth a heck of a lot more. In fact, if you add up all the hours you spent working on it, you probably couldn’t charge enough for it. Here’s the thing, though: you can’t focus on your worth or your book’s worth—you have to focus on what the market will bear.

Consider the ebook. In general, I find that most traditional publishers don’t know how to price an ebook. I’ll see ebooks priced at $9.99 and up, which is a deterrent for most readers. As you build your marketing plan, keep in mind that ebooks should not be priced equal to their print counterparts. Even pricing them within a dollar or two of a $14.95 book is too high.

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Print as the Future of Barnes & Noble

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This post by Jane Litte originally appeared on her Dear Author site on 1/19/14.

Barnes & Noble is a venerable brand in US consumer circles. It touts itself as the world’s largest bookseller and is composed of three segments: the main retail segment, B&N College. and Nook Media.

In 2009, B&N launched the Nook, a product aimed at the upper middle class mother with two children. Overpriced and underfeatured, the Nook tablets have faltered despite the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the Nook segment of the business.

After poor holiday sales in 2012, it was acknowledged that BN would need to move away [from] developing hardware devices and look toward licensing its product on existing platforms. After the disappointing 2013 holiday sales, BN’s CEO was fired and the Nook Media head moved into the position leaving Nook Media without an internal leader.

Everyone in the business of publishing is holding its collective breath about the health of BN. On the plus side, the largest portion publishing revenues come from the sale of educational books (textbooks and other educational products) but that market is headed for a disruption soon. On the negative side, overall consumer dollars spent on books is contracting. One think tank believes that it will continue to contract over the next five years as consumers shift dollars from higher paid books to self published and free books.

 

Click here to read the full post on Dear Author.

 

Barnes & Noble's Nook Nightmare Stars Amazon and the DOJ

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This article by Brad Stone originally appeared on Bloomberg Businessweek on 1/9/14. It’s a worthy read for authors or publishers releasing books for the Nook platform.

Let’s boil down Barnes & Noble’s (BKS) Nook nightmare into a handy juxtaposition concerning the price of the digital version of Donna Tartt’s gripping new novel, The Goldfinch.

Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle price: $7.50.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook price: $14.99.

There are plenty of reasons for the stunning decline of the once-promising Nook. Barnes & Noble has found itself unable to compete with the likes of Apple (AAPL) and Amazon in the broader arena of multipurposed tablets. The New York-based retailer has also been undermined by the continuing migration of its customers from physical stores to online book-buying and by the desire of its risk-averse institutional shareholders to support deep, profit-draining, long-term investments in new frontiers.

Even that doesn’t completely account for the dramatic upending of its Nook business. Barnes & Noble today reported gruesome numbers—a 60 percent drop in its digital division, to $125 million, from its sales in last year’s holiday period. (Sales in its physical stores fell 6.6 percent from the previous year.)

 

Click here to read the full article on Bloomberg Businessweek.