The Business of Writing: Ebook launch pricing strategies #ASMSG #MFRWOrg

Pre-decimal till, Museum of Liverpool.
Photo by Reptonix; free Creative Commons
license via Wikimedia Commons.

Welcome to The Maze's second installment of a three-part series on book pricing. 

For your convenience, if you missed part 1 about print edition pricing, you may view it here.

This week I tackle the trickier concept of e-book launch pricing.

Why is e-book pricing trickier?

Because with the establishment of a vendor account for digital publishing comes the relative ease of controlling your book’s pricing.

There exists a great temptation to set a price and leave it in perpetuity. That’s the easiest approach, but unless you have decided to make your book permafree, in the long run that practice will cause more harm than good for its sales figures.

The launch price of an e-book depends upon a number of factors, including:

• An author’s popularity. The bigger your fan base, the more you can get away with pricing your books higher than your book’s competitors.
• Whether the book is fiction or nonfiction. Like it or not, digital fiction is now being perceived almost as a commodity, with readers demanding to read an author’s blood, sweat, and tears for nothing or next to it. Not so with nonfiction e-books, which can attract a fair number of readers even when priced at $9.99 or more.
• The popularity of your book’s genre or subject matter. In general, books written for more popular genres can enjoy more sales at higher prices, but in a decision between two books by different authors, where both authors are unknown to the customer, she will usually opt for the lower-priced book unless influenced by other factors such as reviews, cover appeal, or synopsis.
• If part of a series, its sequence number. Most authors discount or make permafree the first book in their series after other installments become available. This entices readers to acquire the earlier works for a modest investment, potentially earning the author more fans along the way.

When establishing the price of your book’s digital edition, you need to ask yourself whether you would rather maximize the number of downloads, or maximize your royalties.

Among the major e-book distribution platforms—Nook Press, Kobo, and iTunes, in addition to KDP—Amazon is the only one that forces authors to set a certain price in order to earn its highest royalty payout percentage. For all Kindle e-books, the minimum price to earn 70% royalties is $2.99 and the e-book must be priced no higher than $9.99; otherwise, the author earns only 35%.

If you wish to maximize your Amazon profits, then, you need to price your e-book to fall within the 70% royalty window. At a 70% royalty rate, a $2.99 book will earn the author $2.09 per download. At $0.99 and an enforced royalty rate of 35%, the Kindle edition of your book will earn $0.35 per download. It will take six sales at ninety-nine cents to surpass the royalties earned from one sale of a $2.99 book. If you think your title will perform well when priced at $2.99 or more, then go for it!

But if you’re like most independent authors whose work struggles to bob above the ocean of books available to readers, then you may be better advised to launch your title at $0.99 and hope to attract proportionally more readers at the lower price point.

That’s how I, as a relatively unknown author at the time, was able to get almost two thousand paid downloads of my medieval paranormal romance Snow in July during the first three months following its July 2014 release with no advertising on my part except for two blog tours. Those aren’t astronomical numbers by any stretch of the imagination, but the performance was good enough to keep Snow in July lodged in Amazon’s top twenty for the category of Teen and Young Adult Historical Romance for several weeks running, earning many more downloads by readers who habitually shop off the first page of the category rankings.

The ninety-nine-cent book launch strategy is by no means a proven formula; so many other factors affect buying decisions, including a book's cover, genre, synopsis, keywords, release date, and its author’s popularity. But in today’s climate of digital fiction being perceived as a commodity, it’s not a bad plan to follow.

Breathing new life into an older title is trickier still, and I will tackle that subject next week.

***

I'm running a giveaway for an e-copy of Snow in July!
To enter, click HERE.

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Subscribe today so you don't miss out!

***

All this month, you are invited to…

— Follow Kim on Twitter
— Follow Kim on Pinterest
— Subscribe to Kim's YouTube channel
— Leave a comment on any page of The Maze, especially if you have done the Twitter, Pinterest, and/or YouTube follow<

… and each action this month is good for one chance to win a copy of any of Kim's e-books.
Please enter often, and good luck!

The Business of Writing: How to Create Permafree Titles #ASMSG #MFRWOrg #IARTG

Young woman reading, c2015 khunaspix,
Depositphotos ID 69719181.

On Saturday we had a blizzard. Yes, a blizzard. In Virginia. In April. Two days later the temperature topped the 70-degree mark. 

Ah, the roller coaster that is the weather of the Appalachian Mountains! :)

With the expectation that winter is finally done with us for another, oh, six months or so, I am happy to post this royalty-free, cost-free spring photo of a young woman reading.

Why is she so happy? Well, it could be that for her it's the first nice day of spring too. Or it could be that she's reading a free book!

Making a print book available for free is as simple as donating copies to libraries; with digital editions, it's a bit trickier, given that the two largest e-book distributors on the planet, Amazon and Nook, do not let you specify a $0.00 price for your e-books directly via your vendor account.

But it's possible, and here's how:

1. Disenroll your e-book from Kindle Unlimited, if you haven't already.
2. Publish it on Kobo and Smashwords, where you can set a price of $0.00 directly via your vendor account. If Smashwords will let you distribute your free book to Amazon, do please leave a comment to that effect below; I have opted out of Amazon distribution via Smashwords because I have my own vendor account there.
   NOTE: If you have just disenrolled the book from Kindle Unlimited, you will have to wait until the current exclusivity period ends before you publish it on any other retail platforms, or you will incur the wrath of Amazon. You do not want to incur the wrath of Amazon, trust me. :D
3. If you have a vendor account on iTunes and they will let you set a $0.00 price directly, please leave a comment and let us all know that too. Lacking any Apple hardware, I publish to iBooks/iTunes via Draft2Digital.com.
4. Definitely get yourself a vendor account at Draft2Digital.com. Here you can set a $0.00 price for your e-book and distribute it to the aforementioned iTunes PLUS Nook, Kobo (if you'd rather not have a separate vendor account there), Scribd, Inktera/Page Foundry, and some European distributors such as 24 Symbols and Tolino. I get a lot of downloads of my free Spanish and German titles downloaded via Tolino.
5. Once the $0.00 prices are in effect at all these other e-tailers' sites, visit the Amazon product page for your book and report the lower price via the link popup located below your book's sales rankings. Get your friends to do the same for you; the more reports they receive, the faster they will activate the price-matching.
6. If for some reason Step 5 fails to achieve the desired result, email Amazon and ask them to price-match the title. Recently author Clare Flynn reported the success of the email tactic in this blog post on the How-to for Authors blog.

I caution you, however, to offer only your very best work free.

Why?

Because this title is going to be your ambassador to potential new fans of your work, and you only get that one golden chance to make a good first impression. Make it shine!

The title you choose to offer free does not have to be a full-length novel. My permafree title, The Color of Vengeance, is a novella excerpted from a much longer work, Morning's Journey. I'm sure it would get more downloads if it was a longer work; one day I may set up book 1 in the series, Dawnflight, as permafree too.

Best of luck to you in all your publishing endeavors!

***

All this month, you are invited to…

— Follow Kim on Twitter
— Follow Kim on Pinterest
— Subscribe to Kim's YouTube channel
— Leave a comment on any page of The Maze, especially if you have done the Twitter, Pinterest, and/or YouTube follow

… and each action this month is good for one chance to win a copy of any of Kim's e-books. 

Please enter often, and good luck!

The Business of Writing: BookBub Roller Coaster Marketing Ride #MFRWOrg #ASMSG

The Giant Dipper ride, 6/23/2015,
Belmont Park, San Diego, CA (c)2015 by neilld,
Bigstock ID 96268628, editorial license only.

Welcome to part 2 of my BookBub marketing adventure, or…
Squealing My Vocal Cords Raw. :)

I may be benched from riding real roller coasters these days, but the BookBub promo of Dawnflight was quite the thrilling ride indeed!

You may recall from last week's description, I ended with the metaphysical peering over the pinnacle of the ride, otherwise known as the stage of:

"Oh, crap, what have I gotten myself into?!?"

You are welcome to read the details in that post, but the bottom line is that I had shelled out close to $500.00 for all the promos I had bought ($380 for the US-only BookBub feature of Dawnflight, and another $102 for several other marketing slots), and because I could host my fan base in my living room, I harbored serious concerns as to whether I would recoup the investment.

Not "when", mind you, but "whether."

Cue the gut churning.


The burst of speed.

In the notes that I had made when I learned of Dawnflight's selection—tips I'll be blogging about in a "lessons learned" post next month—I reminded myself to start checking for sales after 3 p.m. ET on the day of the feature.

This estimate was based upon a statement in the BookBub Deal Checklist: "Your deal will go live on our website between 6-9 a.m. PST, and the email will generally be delivered by 10 a.m.-noon PST."

Still, I couldn't resist taking an early peek. I fired up my KDP dashboard at around 11:15 a.m. that morning and noticed that I had already logged well over a hundred downloads of Dawnflight alone, and its sequels and my standalone books were attracting the attention of buyers too! The needle had already moved into the respectable range on Nook as well.

In an hour those numbers had doubled, and the counters kept spinning at a dizzying rate throughout the afternoon and evening, and well on into the night.


Squealing my vocal cords raw.

I broke even on the BookBub promo investment by 11:00 p.m., around 12 hours into the feature period. By the beginning of the next day, when most of the other paid promos were scheduled to begin, I had already broken even on those too.

At last I could let go of the rail and truly enjoy the feel of the wind whipping my hair and slipping past my face and fingers.


The best coasters have lesser, tighter loops and dips to rekindle your squeals as the ride thunders toward its conclusion, and the coaster that is a BookBub promotion for an indie-published novel is no different.

The first such secondary squeal occurred when I learned that BookBub had placed Dawnflight in its top slot for the Fantasy category that day. The curators also verified my USA Today review blurb, and even mined a few more words from it than I usually use. :)

BookBub Fantasy page, Thursday, 3/3/2016.

And although I've had novels hit the top 20 in an Amazon category—Snow in July stayed among the top 20 Teen Medieval Romance novels for about 10 weeks after it was released (late July–early October, 2014), and BookBub and those other paid promo sites weren't so much as a gleam in my eye in those days—I never thought I'd see the day when I could take a screenshot like this:

Top 3 Amazon Greco-Roman myths & legends, 3/4/2016.
Dawnflight, Raging Sea: Reckonings, and Morning's Journey
in top 3 slots, respectively.

Or this:

Dawnflight Amazon page, 10:17 a.m. ET 3/4/2016,
#291 paid in Kindle Store; #1 in Arthurian Fantasy + 2 others,
Kim Headlee's Amazon author rank #39 in Kindle Fantasy.

And you could have pushed me over with a feather, four days after the BookBub promo, when I saw this:

King Arthur's Sister in Washington's Court Amazon page 09:00 3/7/16
Dawnflight still at #1 in Greco-Roman myths & legends category.

Another mini-squeal occurred when I learned about my iTunes sales, since I distribute to that platform via Draft2Digital (D2D), where royalty reporting is delayed by as much as two days.

You may have even heard the whoop I let out when I checked my ACX dashboard and learned that approximately 10% of the Dawnflight e-book customers had purchased its audiobook edition! That in itself was as great a thrill as the mountain of e-book downloads.


All good things…

In the vacuum of space, a body in motion will stay in motion. Here on earth, alas, all bodies are subject to outside forces such as gravity and friction, and hence coasters must roll to a stop. After all, it's time for the next batch of passengers to have their turn.

As of this writing, Dawnflight has been reset to its pre-BookBub pricing but my books are still logging more downloads per day than they experienced prior to the BookBub feature. This is every bit as valuable as the initial rush, for it means that I'm gaining fans who wish to seek out more of my work.

My promo train may be in the process of coasting to a stop, but I'm already planning my next trip on the ride. BookBub will feature the same book no more frequently than once every six months, but an author may be featured as often as every 30 days. And I do have several other books that qualify.

Follow me on BookBub to find out what the next great deal will be!

***

All this month, you are invited to…

— Follow Kim on Twitter
— Follow Kim on Pinterest
— Subscribe to Kim's YouTube channel
— Leave a comment on any page of The Maze, especially if you have done the Twitter, Pinterest, and/or YouTube follow

… and each action this month is good for one chance to win a copy of any of Kim's e-books. 

Please enter often, and good luck!

The Business of Writing: 99c is the new Free at BookBub and other paid promo sites

The Giant Dipper ride, 6/23/2015,
Belmont Park, San Diego, CA (c)2015 by neilld,
Bigstock ID 96268628, editorial license only.

There are very few pleasures I enjoy in life more than roller coasters: the excruciating wait of the queue; the niggling anxiety of climbing into the car; the mounting anticipation as the train grinds up that first and steepest incline; the moment of, "Oh, crap, what have I gotten myself into?!?" at the pinnacle; the jaw-dropping, gut-wrenching burst of speed; the sheer joy of feeling the wind through my hair and fingers as I let go of the rail and squeal my vocal cords raw! 

Even the final coast back into the station brings a blessed sense of relief... coupled with the intense urge to race back into the queue to do it all over again.

Although a near-fatal car wreck in 2003 has left me with permanent pins in my neck and has put the brakes on my amusement-park adventures, I just got off the ride of my life: a BookBub feature promotion of my novel Dawnflight!



The Queue

Of all the paid promotional sites that I've tried for all my books in the past year, (sizes of mailing lists aside) BookBub is unique for its rule that a book not be offered at the "deal" price for more than 14 days out of the past 90. They have some way of checking that too, as I discovered last year when I tried submitting another book. It was rejected almost immediately on the grounds that I had violated the 14-day pricing rule; last year I was offering all my titles at 99 cents or free for months at a stretch.

So, since I wasn't sure which book I would be able to place with BookBub first, I gritted my teeth and raised prices on all my full-length novels. This meant suffering next to nothing in sales during that excruciating period, but—as with the roller coaster queue—the torture eased once BookBub informed me of Dawnflight's selection.

The end of the queue had lurched into sight at last!



Climbing into the Car

Sometimes with coasters you have a choice of cars to ride in, and sometimes you don't. Give me a choice, and I will sit in the front seat of the first car every time!

Although you can specify a preferred promotional period, every article I've read about landing a BookBub promotion advises that your chances of being selected improve markedly if you tell them your dates are flexible. So that's what I did.

BookBub assigned Thursday, March 3 as my book's feature date. I chose to follow Amazon's Kindle Select model and have my 99-cent deal run 5 days, through midnight PT on Monday 3/7/16, though for BookBub I specified that the deal would end midnight PT on Sunday 3/6/16.

BookBub gives dire warnings about ending your deal preamaturely, and I wanted to make sure that I wouldn't get banned from the ride forever on my very first trip down the rails.

Now here's where the roller-coaster analogy doesn't quite match a BookBub promo, for the stage of grinding up the first and steepest incline is switched with:


"Oh, crap, what have I gotten myself into?!?"

I paid $380.00 for a US-only feature in the Fantasy category, for which BookBub reports a subscriber list of more than 1,400,000.

If a year ago you had told me that I would have been =excited= to shell out that much money for one email promotional advertisement for one 99-cent e-book, I would have recommended that you find yourself a room with lots of padding and no windows.

But in that intervening year, I did a lot of investigating into what other people have written about their BookBub promotions, in addition to studying BookBub's own statistics and recommendations.

My conclusion:
99 cents is the new Free.

Yes, it costs significantly more to advertise a 99-cent book than a free book, and, yes, you will see far fewer downloads. However, you stand a much better chance of recouping your advertising costs by promoting a 99-cent book than by offering it free and then praying to All That Is Holy that people will also choose to buy your sequels and other books.

The advice I read from other authors suggested combining a BookBub feature with advertising on other sites, which I decided to follow.

The promos I chose to run in conjunction with BookBub's, set for a day or more later (3/4/16-3/7/16) to gauge the first day of the BookBub promo by itself:

• 3/4/16: BookSends (http://booksends.com/advertise.php). $25, Fantasy (cost varies by genre and deal price).
• 3/4/16: Books Butterfly (http://www.booksbutterfly.com/order/paidbookslots/). $30 for "Titanium 30" level of 15 "guaranteed" downloads. Number of "guaranteed" downloads varies by how much you're willing to shell out. They do not accept individual books priced at more than $1. They do provide a link, however, for tracking featured book's Amazon rank, which is cool.
  Dawnflight's campaign link is: http://trackmyrank.com/B00BLNN6XS/
• 3/7/16: eBookSoda (http://www.ebooksoda.com/authors/). Flat fee $15.
• 3/4/16: Genre Pulse (http://www.genrepulse.com/how-it-works/). Another site that accepts only free or 99c books. Full promo is a flat fee $40. They now offer genre-specific pricing too, and they give discount coupons for repeat advertisers (this promo cost me $32 with the coupon). They provide a link to clickthrough stats; the campaign link for Dawnflight is https://bitly.com/1TYKAZ4+.
• 3/4/16: ~20 other sites via the browser plugin app KDROI.
  One-time fee ($39) to submit Kindle free, 99-cent (as of 10/26/15), and permafree (as of 11/1/15) book deals to various sites in perpetuity.
  http://www.5minutepublishing.com/members/kdroi/

Total cost: $482.00 (not counting the KDROI one-time fee, which I paid months ago and have used for several promos already).

Would I have snagged more downloads had I offered Dawnflight free? You betcha. Hundreds if not thousands more. However, would I have recouped the promo cost via the sales of other books in the series?

I'm not altogether certain I would have. Why? Because most people downloading a free book will add it to the hundreds of other free books on their e-readers, and heaven only knows when they will get around to reading yours or mine.

People who have bought a book, even at only 99 cents, will be more likely to read it sooner rather than later.

Important: make sure your best work is what you're discounting -- whether it's for 99 cents or free. Author DP Denman in his guest post for BTSeMag offers excellent wisdom regarding why:

The point behind freebies [or 99-cent discount deals ~kih] isn’t to hand out a sample of something you pulled from the trash. Imagine what would happen if a cookie company did that. One taste of the burnt treats full of dirt or bug parts and customers would never buy anything from that company again.

Don't give away or discount your burnt-cookie-and-bug books! You have nothing to gain by that practice, and everything to lose.

You certainly will never land a BookBub promo that way; their jurying process is thorough and rigorous. The current edition of Dawnflight is a rerelease (as an official second edition because of my substantial revisions and content additions) of a 1999 Simon & Schuster award-winning mass-market title. I have my fingers crossed that they will accept other of my full-length titles.

Offer your audience a taste of your very best full-length work—at 99 cents, so you can still profit from the promo—and the rest will attend to itself.

Since this post is already much longer than I'd planned, I'm going to leave you teetering at the top of the incline until next week. Yep, I'm that mean!

Hey, it's better than being stuck at the bottom with everyone else waiting in the queue. The view is breathtaking up here. :D

***

All this month, you are invited to…

— Follow Kim on Twitter
— Follow Kim on Pinterest
— Subscribe to Kim's YouTube channel
— Leave a comment on any page of The Maze, especially if you have done the Twitter, Pinterest, and/or YouTube follow

… and each action this month is good for one chance to win a copy of any of Kim's e-books. 

Please enter often, and good luck!