In which I talk about ebook pricing
Opening announcement related to the subject of this post: Smashwords’s annual Read an Ebook sale runs March 7-March 13, 2021. You can check out all the books included in the sale here. And you can check out which of my books are available here–including several that are free this week.
You’ll note that no New Smut Project books are included. There’s two reasons for that–the meat of this post:
First, especially if you’re interested in the first two anthologies from NSP, keep your eye on them, because something fun will happen for their sixth birthday around March 23, and I didn’t want to confuse things by running multiple promos in a single month.
Second, while I do include NSP anthologies in some Smashwords sales, I never discount them below 50% (with the exception of Smashwords’s Authors Give Back sale last spring, which was…like so much of 2020…an unprecedented response to unprecedented times). Sales are good for promotion, getting the books in front of new eyes. They also give people who don’t have a lot of disposable income for book-buying the chance to pick up a title they’ve had on their wishlist. I want NSP’s books to be accessible. At the same time, I’ve picked a base price for them that I know is worth the value they offer.
After all, $8 (and under $20 in paperback) for 400 pages of smut and erotic romance is a good value. Erato, for $7 (or $16 in paperback), offers 50+ erotic scenes–less than 15 cents each. And then I’m humbled and excited–humblcited?–when reviews of the anthologies name a particular story or handful of stories as “Worth the price of admission on their own” (human taste being what it is, they don’t often name the same stories). That’s exactly the kind of value we want our books to provide!
In A People’s Guide to Publishing, Joe Biel remarks on the complexities of book pricing, and especially discounting, on a much larger scale than NSP has yet reached:
In 2012, I was on a panel at a festival in Pendleton, Oregon, about the future of books. The opposing view of my own was presented by a woman who had sold 100,000 copies of her fantasy novel eBook. At that time I had sold a little over 1.3 million books, with about 100,000 copies of my bestseller. Naturally, the juice was in the details. The other panelist revealed that the first 30,000 copies of her book had been ‘sold’ for free. She had then raised the price to 99 cents for the next 30,000 and the remaining 40,000 copies had sold for $2.99, making her net profit less than $15,000. Still, she was the envy of the room… But after expenses and paying the author, our company had netted over $400,000 on 100,000 copies of one title alone.
Now, Biel’s Microcosm Publishing uses offset printing, which means more money is earned per hard copy sold. And frankly, I wouldn’t say a strident No to the chance to sell 100,000 copies of any book I’ve worked on for ~$15,000 net earnings. That would be a significant chunk of change for my purposes and better yet, many readers.
After all, I’m giving away some books for free or for 99 cents this very week in hopes of getting more readers. Readers are fantastic :D, plus several of my stories have themes–like To Have and To Hold, which breaks down herpes stigma–that I want to reach as many people as possible. (It’s not like I’m wearing a sandwich board on the street corner, either–if I say so myself, the honeymoon pegging sex in THaTH is damn hot.) However, it’s a lot simpler to give my own short stories away for free than to give away longer work, much less someone else’s work.
Contributors to the first two New Smut Project anthologies are paid entirely by royalties–if sales of those books earn nothing, neither do the writers. And if Erato was given away for free, NSP would have no source of income to pay authors for future anthologies. In the future, as we have more books for sale, perhaps one could be made a “loss leader” or even “permafree”–but Biel’s whole point is that successful publishers don’t need to do that, and there are other reasons offering a book at a step discount can backfire.
For instance, the matter of perceived value. These are good books. A lot of time and effort went into making them. The presentation–from cover art to price–should reflect that.
Another reason is that the customers who buy something just because it’s cheap or discounted might not be the ones who vibe with the product itself: in Worth Every Penny, Sarah Petty and Erin Verbeck share results of research into Groupon follow-ups: “We find a surge in [Yelp] reviews subsequent to the offer. But we also find that reviewers mentioning ‘Groupons’ and ‘coupons’ provide strikingly lower rating scores than those that do not.”
For ebooks specifically, Catherine Ryan Howard observes in Self-Printed: The Sane Person’s Guide to Self-Publishing that readers who buy ebooks simply because they’re inexpensive are often not the authors’ target audience. When an ebook is priced at $4.99 or $6.99 rather than $2.99 or $0.99, it’s not a complete impulse purchase: the reader looks at the description, checks out reviews, and reads the sample pages before deciding to buy. This avoids 1-star reviews from church ladies who bought a 99 cent erotica book (or suspense, science fiction, historical fiction…basically any genre) and were shocked to see it contains the f-word.
Howard also recommends increasing an ebook’s price over time if it continues to sell, but I’m not sure that’s fair to readers. And if I wouldn’t feel good about it, I can’t use it as a pricing strategy. But maybe it’s “fairer” than an alternative of setting a high initial price and discounting afterward? Yet the marketing tip I’d learned is that big fans and ‘leader’ types will be fine with paying a little more if they get the item they want right away. Readers who wait for discounts pay with their patience rather than money. (And either way, they’re committed to the book because they want the story it tells, not because it’s cheap.)
Overall, I try to keep prices stable, with occasional well-advertised discounts for promotion and accessibility. To reflect the value of the book and have room for offering discounts, I need to price above rock bottom.
And discounts offer one more benefit: a way to circumvent Jeff Bezos. Smashwords’s sales attract readers to buy directly from Smashwords rather than Amazon (not only does this fight the monopoly, but authors surely appreciate receiving Smashwords’s 85% royalty rate rather than Amazon’s 70%–and while 85% of a discounted price may be less, it’s not like readers only buy on Smashwords during Read an Ebook Week. The sale just helps encourage more people to set up accounts and make purchases there). On the New Smut Project’s Gumroad store, where we receive ~90% of each sale, we’re able to offer discount codes to each newsmutprojectfan—get it? That’s the discount code. We don’t keep it secret because we want people to use it. You save a dollar, we earn more, and Jeff Bezos gets none–except at most the print cost of a paperback, which, yes, we’re currently printing on demand through Kindle Direct Publishing. It’s the most inexpensive POD option, thereby helping us price our books more accessibly and earn more to pay authors. Is it ungrateful of me to acknowledge the benefits Amazon offers us while also trying not to earn them as much money? I figure Amazon does get paid for the books it prints (see discussion here) and all the books sold through its storefront, which it is plenty good at attracting people to use. But that doesn’t make me their feudal vassal obligated to ensure they get 30%+ of all purchases of the books I publish.
Selling off of Amazon does knock a book’s Amazon sales rank and theoretically harms its visibility in the store, but frankly, I don’t expect most people to discover my books on a random walk through Amazon. Heck, I searched for “consensual erotica” (one of Between the Shores’s keywords) the other day and my results included The Story of O. “Discoverability” on Amazon doesn’t seem like all it’s cracked up to be, or nearly as achievable. Plus, given the rise of Bookshop.org last year, I like to think there’s a larger trend of online book buyers looking at shopfronts other than Amazon. (NSP books are available through Bookshop.org! We only receive the “expanded distribution” KDP royalty rate for them, but 10% of your purchase price goes to support local bookshops—and another 10% is paid as an affiliate fee when you buy through my storefront—so consider yourself encouraged to shop there, if my encouragement matters.)
I’ll put it this way: 50% of Erato’s earnings during its first month of sales–October 23-November 23, 2020–came through our Gumroad store.
So there’s my outlook on ebook pricing (and a little bit on paperbacks). If you’ve discovered that this is the most interesting topic in the world to you, first off, I’m delighted and want you to be my new best friend. Second, you might love Jamie McGarry’s series on small press publishing on Medium, which goes even deeper into these topics. Here, for instance, he talks about discounting and distribution.