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Post by jjmainor on Feb 5, 2018 8:37:40 GMT -8
Sorry for another reply, I'm beginning to think I'm just ranting here, but I'm really only trying to throw out some thoughts rattling in my brain right now. I ran into another issue a year and half ago with Apple after trying something else unconventional. I got to thinking after noticing more people would download a crappy short story than download the 15-20% free sample to check out a serious book. As an experiment then, I took the first 4 chapters of my most recent book, and released it as a free stand-alone book, making sure it was very clear, not only in the description, but on the cover in big letters, what they were getting. Sure enough, I had more people download that incomplete book than I had downloading the free sample for any full-sized work. More exposure, right? So I did it again with my next work, and that got Apple's attention. Turns out, it's actually in the SW TOS that most of us just click accept without really reading that we are not to put up incomplete books. Oops, Apple only took issue with one of the "samples," but I pulled them both rather than play ignorant and wait for that one to get noticed. It didn't bother me, and still doesn't, but it still makes me shake my head that retailers in general get locked into their ways of doing things, and instead of looking at whether or not something works, they want nothing to do with it. It amazes me, listening to certain retailers reporting disappointing earnings to Wall Street and placing the blame everywhere else when consumers know the fault lies with them, what they're doing or not doing. Anywa, I'm now feeling like this is turning into the rant I didn't want, so I'll leave it at that
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Post by djmills on Feb 5, 2018 13:58:23 GMT -8
Wow! As $0.20 and $0.99 are both low prices, "possibly too low to charge on bank card or debit chard" or whatever, why are they not treated like free pricing? And, why is $0.20 price getting into trouble when $0.99 is not? It is not bank fees/processing fees. They would already be included in the percentage Kobo takes on each sale.
Keep experimenting with different prices until some of your books take off. Then you can do a seminar about it. :-)
Personally, I will keep between $2.99 and $4.99 (depending on genre and length) because I don't care if no one buys my stories, but I certainly worked hard to produce them and believe in being paid for hard work. :-) And a coffee in Australia is $4.50 or more. :-)
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chelsfield
SWF Writers
Posts: 700
Joined: Mar 28, 2012 3:07:24 GMT -8
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Post by chelsfield on Feb 6, 2018 0:48:52 GMT -8
Wow, a bit of a saga there! You should seriously consider writing up your adventures in pricing for an article or short book.
Secondly, I do have to say that I am impressed with SW's attention and responses in this matter. Actually sounds like a person and not a step child of grinder.
That's interesting about box sets and pretty much reflects my experience as a reader. I don't tend to go for box sets, and part of it is down to whether I have bought the first book or not. I can't really explain it, especially if the other books are reduced from single purchase buying. Maybe because it feels like too much of a commitment?
Finally, the pricing. I do see Kobo's perspective in all this. Your purchases may before multiple books thereby with an increased final sale, but do you have proof that if more authors adopted your approach, there wouldn't be a whole pile of ditty individual purchases for them to handle?
So are they saying the lowest you can sell books for is .99 on Kobo? Instead of immediately withdrawing the books, I would try them again at that price and see if that run caused by the lower pricing has raised the profile of your books. Have you been getting reviews or likes or whatever with the sales?
At the end of the day, it doesn't cost you anything to keep them in the Kobo catalogue and you can put it to SW this way: evidence for a certain insight in to the psychology of purchasing-you couldn't sell them for the standard price and you couldn't give them away. But people would rather pay price than get them for free. Does that prove that peopld value things more if they have to pay for them?
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chelsfield
SWF Writers
Posts: 700
Joined: Mar 28, 2012 3:07:24 GMT -8
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Post by chelsfield on Feb 6, 2018 0:52:07 GMT -8
Just saw your experience with Apple. Fascinating behavior by readers. You should really write this up...
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Post by jjmainor on Feb 9, 2018 5:06:03 GMT -8
Wow! As $0.20 and $0.99 are both low prices, "possibly too low to charge on bank card or debit chard" or whatever, why are they not treated like free pricing? And, why is $0.20 price getting into trouble when $0.99 is not? It is not bank fees/processing fees. They would already be included in the percentage Kobo takes on each sale. Keep experimenting with different prices until some of your books take off. Then you can do a seminar about it. :-) Personally, I will keep between $2.99 and $4.99 (depending on genre and length) because I don't care if no one buys my stories, but I certainly worked hard to produce them and believe in being paid for hard work. :-) And a coffee in Australia is $4.50 or more. :-) Actually the pricing I was trying to use showed signs of what was going to work. It was my shorter works that I set for the equivalent of 5-6 cents in Japan, and they began to take off at that price. The Freedom Reigns Series clocked in around 50k words per book while my Depot-14 and Timberlands series were about 20k words per book give-or-take. People buying were scooping up the entire series, but the funny thing was, they weren't taking the free first books It's possible they already got the free books from Smashwords at some time in the past, or maybe they didn't want the free books. I don't know, but I still found it funny. I hear what you're saying about pricing, but the idea came from a note SW put out about experiment with territory pricing. It was SW that pointed out how certain countries like India have a lower cost-of-living, where to them, the equivalent of 99cents USD is a lot more money than it is to us. It was SW that suggested lowering prices in certain countries to better reflect that COL - countries where we don't normally sell books. While I understand the backlash against going too low, I feel a little disappointed that it sounds like they didn't stand up for what I was trying to do.
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Post by jjmainor on Feb 9, 2018 5:28:40 GMT -8
Wow, a bit of a saga there! You should seriously consider writing up your adventures in pricing for an article or short book. Secondly, I do have to say that I am impressed with SW's attention and responses in this matter. Actually sounds like a person and not a step child of grinder. That's interesting about box sets and pretty much reflects my experience as a reader. I don't tend to go for box sets, and part of it is down to whether I have bought the first book or not. I can't really explain it, especially if the other books are reduced from single purchase buying. Maybe because it feels like too much of a commitment? Finally, the pricing. I do see Kobo's perspective in all this. Your purchases may before multiple books thereby with an increased final sale, but do you have proof that if more authors adopted your approach, there wouldn't be a whole pile of ditty individual purchases for them to handle? So are they saying the lowest you can sell books for is .99 on Kobo? Instead of immediately withdrawing the books, I would try them again at that price and see if that run caused by the lower pricing has raised the profile of your books. Have you been getting reviews or likes or whatever with the sales? At the end of the day, it doesn't cost you anything to keep them in the Kobo catalogue and you can put it to SW this way: evidence for a certain insight in to the psychology of purchasing-you couldn't sell them for the standard price and you couldn't give them away. But people would rather pay price than get them for free. Does that prove that peopld value things more if they have to pay for them? And what I like about SW is that when you break the TOS, they let you know so you can correct it. When I see others talk about their experiences with Amazon, the general consensus is that a TOS violation results in immediate shutdown and they more or less seize unpaid earnings. I'm not sure what the bottom is on pricing - there is no guidance except that you cannot price below 99cents for the home country unless you go free. It's like the Voting Rights Act here in the States which requires the states to use race when drawing their congressional districts - but not too much race. States have no idea what the appropriate amount of consideration is, and the courts won't issue that guidance when the inevitable lawsuits rise, so we've been dealing with lawsuits over racially drawn congressional districts for 50 years...and the general consensus regarding political gerrymandering falls on the same lines when the Supreme Court eventually rules on the case from Wisconsin - they'll probably strike down the district in question for being too politically gerrmandered, but they won't explain how much is too much, and we'll see these cases popping up for another generation or so. As far as pulling from Kobo, if I wasn't even giving away free books on their site, I'm not losing any business. Sort of like with Apple where I can play on the anti-Amazon market by pulling books from Amazon, I'm thinking I can spin this with a message "BANNED ON KOBO!" or something similar. Since they blocked the books initially, and if I don't say why they were pulled, it's technically not false advertising, and I play to that whole banned book market. Of course, I'm still thinking it through carefully before I go ahead with it, but that is the thinking. As far as the pricing itself, many of these companies are making their money by nickel-and-diming anyway. These sites don't really mind millions of indie authors uploading millions of books that will only sell a couple copies each because for them, they make their money off the collective sales of all 1-3 million books. From a business perspective, it would make sense if they could make a penny per book on all the non-sellers in the catalog - a penny they wouldn't otherwise make - because the cumulative affect of all those pennies across the bottom 99% of those books would be a huge windfall for them. Nothing stops them from require a minimum purchase so the CC fees don't eat up all those pennies - requiring people buying those 5-10 cent books to purchase a certain amount before they can check out. I can't ask them to do it just for me, but it would make sense for them on a larger scope. And think about it like this...When a library runs a book sale to clean out their shelves, or you go to a rummage sale or other somesuch, how many people are there buying up books by the bagload? That's what I envision with this whole line.
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Post by jjmainor on Feb 11, 2018 6:55:42 GMT -8
Some other observations/thoughts for anyone who is thinking of experimenting:
When setting prices in other countries on Amazon, they do prevent you from setting prices lower than they want, so you can't set your price at .1 Euro in Italy for example.
I've been experimenting with image-heavy books under a pen name on Amazon for the last three months. If you ever wonder why the delivery charge comes into play, trying putting pictures in your books. What's worse, Amazon is more limiting with pricing the larger the file. My first test piece, Amazon wouldn't let me price it below 1.99. My most recent endeavor, 2.99 was the bottom. All this has been at the 35% royalty rate...if I were to choose the higher rate, the delivery fee eats up the entire royalty, so...
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Ria Stone
SWF Writers
Posts: 1,055
Joined: Oct 30, 2013 14:12:26 GMT -8
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Post by Ria Stone on Mar 9, 2018 10:29:06 GMT -8
Some other observations/thoughts for anyone who is thinking of experimenting: When setting prices in other countries on Amazon, they do prevent you from setting prices lower than they want, so you can't set your price at .1 Euro in Italy for example. I've been experimenting with image-heavy books under a pen name on Amazon for the last three months. If you ever wonder why the delivery charge comes into play, trying putting pictures in your books. What's worse, Amazon is more limiting with pricing the larger the file. My first test piece, Amazon wouldn't let me price it below 1.99. My most recent endeavor, 2.99 was the bottom. All this has been at the 35% royalty rate...if I were to choose the higher rate, the delivery fee eats up the entire royalty, so... J, can you post a link to any of your image heavy books. I am curious because many of my works have images, too, probably not as many as yours but I have to post them as epubs to retain the formatting.
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Post by jjmainor on Mar 15, 2018 2:54:08 GMT -8
While I don't want to admit/tie myself to the particular pen name, this is a smaller project I put up as a test under a neutral name. It is still 13 MB and Amazon would not let me price it below 1.99... www.amazon.com/dp/B076WWYW4RI've been working on comics lately, and I've been using Kindle Comic Creator to format them. I've been real happy with the finished product, but I'd like to pull them from Select after two cycles and issue them wide. Problem is, I need a new way to format them. I tested out Calibre before using Comic Creator, and while I'm satisfied with the epub, I'm not at all happy with the mobi...plus I'm not sure if it enables panel view like CC does. I've been trying to pick up a few comics off SW to see what others are doing, but too many people are placing books that are not comics in the comic categories and most of the rest are horrible products (I'm not talking about the story or the art, but the finished ebook product).
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Post by jaydax on Apr 24, 2018 5:13:26 GMT -8
I haven't experimented with territory pricing but I have done so with device pricing. Apple rounds all prices up to the nearest 0.99. If you set an ebook price at $3.01 it will be $3.99 at Apple. I'm assuming that this is because Apple has worked out that the people who buy Apple devices have more money than sense?
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Post by jaydax on Apr 24, 2018 5:28:21 GMT -8
I got to thinking after noticing more people would download a crappy short story than download the 15-20% free sample to check out a serious book. As an experiment then, I took the first 4 chapters of my most recent book, and released it as a free stand-alone book, making sure it was very clear, not only in the description, but on the cover in big letters, what they were getting. Sure enough, I had more people download that incomplete book than I had downloading the free sample for any full-sized work. More exposure, right? So I did it again with my next work, and that got Apple's attention. Turns out, it's actually in the SW TOS that most of us just click accept without really reading that we are not to put up incomplete books. Oops, Read more: smashwords-forum.proboards.com/thread/1928/played-territory-pricing?page=2#ixzz5DazPhSODI've often wondered if it would be worthwhile making a 'Book of Samples' - chapters from a variety of authors. You take the first 3/4/5 whatever chapters of several books and put them together as a book of samples to be given away free. Possibly it could use books2read.com links to allow readers to buy the book at the retailer of their choice. At the end of each sample there would be a link for the reader to buy the full ebook if the sample catches their interest. I'm sure it would be an effective sales technique but would Smashwords and others see this as an incomplete book?
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Post by jjmainor on Apr 24, 2018 6:05:58 GMT -8
I haven't experimented with territory pricing but I have done so with device pricing. Apple rounds all prices up to the nearest 0.99. If you set an ebook price at $3.01 it will be $3.99 at Apple. I'm assuming that this is because Apple has worked out that the people who by Apple devices have more money than sense? I've posted before on my experience with Apple's pricing, how when I price my books at weird increments like that, I'll sometimes sell more books on Apple at the higher price than I will anywhere else at the lower price. It's almost like Apple buyers enjoy knowing they pay more than anyone else for the same product...
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Post by jjmainor on Apr 24, 2018 6:16:04 GMT -8
I haven't experimented with territory pricing but I have done so with device pricing. Apple rounds all prices up to the nearest 0.99. If you set an ebook price at $3.01 it will be $3.99 at Apple. I'm assuming that this is because Apple has worked out that the people who by Apple devices have more money than sense? I've posted before on my experience with Apple's pricing, how when I price my books at weird increments like that, I'll sometimes sell more books on Apple at the higher price than I will anywhere else at the lower price. It's almost like Apple buyers enjoy knowing they pay more than anyone else for the same product... It's worth noting that in my experience, Smashwords never has a problem with anything you do...it's the retailers who have the problems, and only then does Smashwords speak up. What you're doing would still technically violate the TOS because, as you said, it is an incomplete work; but you would only get the finger wagging if someone like Apple or Kobo notices. When I tried placing my samples as standalone freebies, it was only the second one that got attention...no one said anything about the first "sample" I put up, but I pulled it anyway. I think this clause tends to be a gray area as well, because almost every series author's put out is an incomplete story...there's almost always a cliffhanger at the end to drive you to buy the next in the series. While some authors are good about bringing some kind of conclusion to the "part" before dropping that cliffhanger, other authors leave a jarring break when they put "to be continued." Maybe the distinction is entirely in the labeling...maybe if we want to try this, we need to label chapters 1-5 as "Part 1" instead of "sample chapters. It might pass for the retailers, but I take personal issue to make sure that readers know what they're getting with a "series" book so they're not disappointed when they get to the last page.
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Post by jaydax on Apr 24, 2018 7:14:27 GMT -8
jjmainor I presume the .99 at the end of Apple's prices is because they are aware of the magic '9'. While we all (well most of us) recognise that a price of $2.99 really means $3 it still has an effect on people. A product will sell better at $3.19 than it will at $3.10. Whatever your price is - make sure it ends in that magic '9'. That carries across to other currencies. It's worth checking that prices in pounds, euros, dollars, yen, rupees etc. all end in that '9'. Of course in Europe prices are shown inclusive of VAT (Value added tax) and that complicates matters.
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