‘Worth more than my novel?’
Answers are not required in ‘Comments’
A year ago, as I was getting ready to publish my first novel, I set myself a target. If I was going to be a real writer, then I had to be able to make a proper living through writing. So how have I done so far?
In English English: ‘Not quite as well as I might have done.”
In any other language: “Total wipeout”.
Smashwords: Sold – 121. Earnings – $65.35
Amazon – US: Sold – 33. Earnings – $29.66
Amazon – UK: Sold – 3. Earnings – £0.78
So that’s 157 copies and around $96 earned for the year. Call me cautious, but somehow I don’t think I’ll be able to give up the day job just yet. I’ll need to do better: about 500 times better. Excluding taxation.
So one solution could be to increase the price by a factor of 500. ‘That will be $495, sir. Thank you.’ You know, I have a funny feeling that might just work. I could make it a limited edition, probably grab a few headlines for the most expensive book in the world, and I bet I’d get a few takers.
But that’s not what I’m going to do. I’m going to leave the price exactly where it has been for most of the year – $0.99 or £0.74 (+VAT). The price of a large potato.
Is that what my novel’s worth? I guess it depends how hungry you are. A potato’s certainly more nutritious. It fills a spot. Even if 157 people seem to have opted for my book instead.
Actually, that’s not quite true. The vast majority of my Smashwords ‘sales’ have come when I’ve offered a free copy as part of a promotion – there were 70 just last week during Read An Ebook Week. So these readers probably didn’t have to sacrifice their daily potato. And I suspect that some – maybe most – will be book-hoarders, accumulating books just in case they need them some rainy day. They’ll probably never read mine.
This is why there’s huge debate about what an ebook price ought to be. My Facebook friend and fellow-Brit-lit-author, Ali M Cooper, fulminated recently against price-cutting:
My UK kindle sales continue to drop as the market is flooded by under £1 ‘bargains’ as authors try to undercut each other … My personal guideline is that if I don’t think a full length novel is worth the price of a pint of beer then I shouldn’t be publishing it.
Several other writers agreed with Ali that price-cutting writers should take account of the ‘long-term perceived value of books’ and encouraged a firm stand on pricing. Selling at a low price implied a lack of confidence in your own book, they said.
But then there was another point of view expressed by Carolyn McCray, founder of the Indie Book Collective, in a post this week on understanding the Amazon book-page. You need to get at least 5 – 10 reviews, she said, and fill the ‘Customers-Who-Bought-This-Item-Also-Bought‘ bar. Her advice is:
Price your book at 99 cents (the lowest allowed by Amazon) and drive as much traffic as you can during your ‘soft’ launch window. Once you have the bar filled you can re-price your book.
There’s my problem. My amazon.com page has fantastic reviews – but only three of them. And the books other people bought with mine? A book on Lebanese cuisine, three books on quantum physics and .. oh yes, this is bound to bring the customers flooding in – The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t allow me to re-design my ‘associated books’ bar. I’ll just have to wait until some future customer chooses better bedfellows.
And as for my UK Amazon page. No reviews. No book-links. Nada.
So you see, I’ve got a way to go to establish any kind of credibility. Pricing is just one way I can persuade people to take a peek, maybe download the sample.
Free is probably not the best way – not for novels anyway, although there may be a case for free short stories to introduce people to your work.
But working at the price of least resistance does seem sensible, at least until my reputation begins to grow outside my immediate circle of friends and acquaintances. Perhaps that time will come with The Lebanese Troubles. Perhaps it will be the next novel. Or the third.
If it was just about pricing it would be easy. Unfortunately, it isn’t. A year on, I’m still learning about how to position and present my book, and this week I’ve been busy updating my promotional pages, and even the book content. You may have noticed changes in this blog too – all designed to make it easier for the potential reader to say ‘Yes’, and inspired largely by Carolyn McCray’s article.
There’s another important requirement. Hard work. Talking to your friends and supporters constantly, not necessarily beating your author-drum all the time, but just communicating. Let me return to Ali Cooper. I don’t know how she’d describe her last 12 months, but I’d call it a success.
Ali published her first novel, The Girl on the Swing around 12 months ago, at about the same time as me. It’s a beautifully-controlled, tightly written psycho-drama, the sort of novel I enjoy reading (especially since it follows in the Hardy/Fowles tradition of featuring Lyme Regis). But since Ali’s book is entirely devoid of vampires, cops and wizards … and is not priced at less than a dollar … it’s pretty unlikely to knock Amanda Hocking or J.A.Konrath from their perch at the top of the indie popularity list.
Carefully, steadily, Ali has nurtured her readership, maintaining the writer contacts she built while developing the novel, making new friends (like me) through the various Kindle boards, maintaining a daily presence through Facebook. In all of this, Ali has been much more consistent than me, and now her hard work is really beginning to pay off. Just look at the reviews she’s accumulated. From results she’s mentioned publicly over the past couple of months, I should think that she has a very real chance of achieving my target, self-sufficiency through writing, as she releases her next novel, Cave, at Easter. And from a potato’s-eye view, that’s inspiring!
Useful links:
Ali Cooper: The Girl on a Swing, Amazon US – Amazon UK
Carolyn McCray: Best Practices For Amazon Ebook Sales
Tags: Amazon, ebook, engagement, Facebook, fans net income, Indie writer, marketing, readers, sales, social media, targets
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Hi Alain, I didn’t realise you were watching me
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I probably need to write a whole blog post (or several) to answer some of the points you’ve raised. But here’s a quick summary.I’m probably more than halfway to being self-sufficient from writing. However, I’m not paying rent or supporting a family. If I can earn more than the state benefit level then that’s earning a living. Realistically, someone with dependents might need to look at gradually earning an increased percentage of their income from writing. And to be honest, even with a top mainstream contract, you’d be hard pushed to match eg a teacher’s salary.
The race to the bottom pricing by indies has IMO gone way out of hand and is a combination of competition and hysteria. If all traditionally published books were priced at 70p that would be different. But they’re not. Other indie authors tell me they’re under peer group pressure to reduce their prices. It has become a senseless contest of people bragging about the number of books they’ve sold. Dropping the price is supposedly a cure all substitute for any other method of persuading people to buy your book.
I don’t buy into it. In fact I’ve raised my price to $3.95 in US (amazon are discounting it in UK). Having written a good book, you have to tell people about it. With a niche book, especially, you need to find your readers and, providing it’s lower than most mainstream, I don’t think setting the lowest price is the way to do that. -
Thank you so much for including me in your article! My piece with Digital Book World (http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2011/best-practices-for-amazon-ebook-sales/) has gotten a lot of people thinking about how they position themselves in the digital marketplace.
I would strongly recommend anyone interested to not just read the article but the comments as well. I have given a bunch of tips on how to get more reviews etc.
This is what we do at the Indie Book Collective (www.indiebookcollective.com and @indiebookibc on Twitter). We want to help teach authors how to best use social media to sell their books.
On a side note I would suggest you both shoot higher than you. There are techniques out there to get reviews and drive sales.
If you don’t think big for your novel, who will?
You might also want to listen to our Blog Talk Radio show Tues at 4:30pm PST where we talk marketing and how we have transformed our sales platform
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Thanks Ali and Carolyn. The point I want to make here is not that any of us should aim low, whether in terms of price or sales figures. But this is the point you made, Carolyn, that in the early stages, a book needs to gather a critical mass of support before it can begin to roll under its own momentum. Although my book’s been published for a year, it hasn’t been well curated, as Ali’s has. And therefore I’m still at the stage where low pricing can be one way to encourage new readers to take a chance with a book that nobody knows much about.
It certainly isn’t my intention to keep the price this low long-term. Ali’s higher price certainly seems sustainable now she’s established something of a track-record, and I notice that you, Carolyn, price some of your ebooks higher, others lower.
I guess as with anything else we sell, the ideal price-point is the maximum that most people are happy to pay – and that will depend on whether your book is a rising star or a red dwarf.
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Waiting…waiting…waiting, more than anything else has convinced me to go the indie route with the book I’m now editing. I’m taking my time though and studying in preparation for taking the leap late in the year. Lots of information to sift through and plenty to learn.
I like the idea of being able to buy books for 99 cents, but I’m not too sure that I’d like to sell the work I put so much time into for 99 cents a pop, but trends change so frequently that by the time I’m ready to take the plunge, something else might be in vogue.
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This whole Indie-world thing is pretty new and pretty news. One of my fb friends, Jake Burton is now a bestseller in the UK-Kindle store. Come to think of it, so is my fb friend Steven Leather. (I’ve got some pretty high-falutin fb friends). Both wrote thrillers with serial killers, so there you go. That’s the secret. Also both are selling their books for 99 cents. Volume is good thing and if you have 5 books like (Stephen Leather or Amanda Hocking) it adds up.
I’m shocked by your Smashwords numbers. I’ve made far less than that at Smashwords, though when I was giving my books away there via coupon, they had me listed as a “bestseller.” Even at 99 cents I make enough on Kindle each month to go out to dinner, sometimes enough to pay the check for my spouse as well.
But this idea of making a living as a writer? That’s a tough one. Especially if you’re writing fiction. Most of the best fiction writers do something: journalism, teaching, prostitution, etc. to make ends meet.
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Marion – Maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s a male thing, but I’m not good at multi-tasking. I find that when I work as a journalist, teacher, prostitute, etc, I can’t hold back: I just throw myself into the new job body and soul. So for 6 months I’m a writer, for the next 6 months, as I scramble to make money, I’m not.
This method – early withdrawal, scriptus interruptus – is unreliable and absolutely not to be recommended.
Maybe I should look for a patron. But these days, the Medicis and the Borgias only seem interested in football.
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HI Alain
in pure marketing theory there is a minimum price people will pay for a product that they want. Too cheap and they will consider the product to be a cheap product in terms of quality. I think where the 99c works is that there appears to be impulse buying around. If one has a few books then it makes sense to price one at 99c because it might be impulse bought but the customer might then also buy others because they enjoyed it. If you only have one book and a customer buys it at 99c then really enjoys it, they are not going to offer to pay more afterwards… So I think you really have to write more books. I know, easily said. Looking on the positive side (there’s always one) because you don’t rely on the income from your book you can afford to experiment with the price. There is a price experiment going on at the moment by J A Konrath. He updates on his blog about it every week; this link is to the start of the experiment;
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/02/guest-post-by-victorine-lieske.html
It’s a guest post by Victorine Lieske who talks about the effect of changing the price of her books. J A Konrath picks this up and decides to do an experiment with the prices of his books, and since then he has posted a weekly update on it. I think it is worth a read for anyone interested in ebook pricing, remembering it doesn’t necessarily apply in every case in every genre for every author. -
Useful thoughts and links, Christopher. Here’s another – why Zoe Winters changed from basement-level pricing: http://bit.ly/euhPDO
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