Sunday, February 19, 2012

What's The Right Price For Erotica?

As I mentioned a few days ago, I've lowered the price of my collection of short stories to $4.99. That's still a dollar or two (or three) higher than many similar books out there.

Which raises the question...what's the right price to pay or charge, for good writing?

I've noticed that many writers provide free dowloads of some of their books and that seems like a good way to get readers, especially if you have other titles for sale. Once I read a book that I like, I usually buy more by that writer. I expect that others are probably doing the same thing.

Just like those freaky extreme cheapskates on TLC (did you see the show about the woman who used rags as re-usable toilet paper? Eeewwww.) there are some people who will never pay for a kindle book. They will simply fill their ereaders with all the freebies, since there seems to be an endless supply of them. They probably aren't my target audience.

So then the question becomes, what is the right price? 99 cents? $1.99? $2.99 seems pretty standard. Should price be based on the amount of erotica? The quality of the writing? Or how about the length of the book?

What do you think? What factors do you consider when deciding to buy a book? How much does price play into your decision?

2 comments:

  1. If you are exclusive on Kindle and are getting 70% for sales that are $2.99-$9.99, then you have to do a calculation to establish how many more books you will sell at $0.99 getting 35% than you will at $3 or $5 at 70%.

    Because of the way Amazon is structured, I won't pay over $9.99 for a book. Anyone who is charging more is a big publisher that is sticking it to the author and the reader.

    I like the strategy of releasing the book at $4.99, dropping the price to $2.99 at 3 months and $0.99 at 6 months.

    Don't forget--there is a value in building up a huge base of readers. Right now there are plenty of times when charging less will pay you more over the long run.

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  2. Thanks for you comment. I plan to self-publish a book this summer so I'll be able to tinker w/the price whenever I want to.

    I agree about the $9.99 price. I like supporting indie writers---they are like rebels of the literary world!

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