I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. Continuing a series from last week, I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

Think about any subject long enough and you’re bound to end up in the weeds…

The title of this post refers to a deservedly famous Taxi episode in which Jim burns Louie’s apartment to a cinder, presenting Louie with the opportunity to quantify the practical limits of greed. (See the 7:15 mark here. The bit continues in the next clip.)

The problem with this approach in my case is that the DePalma price for an e-book is probably one dollar over the high end of the acceptable range — meaning something like eleven or twelve dollars. And I would only be able to get that price if the customer borrowed my car and wrapped it around a tree prior to making a purchase.

As much as I would like to embrace my inner greed, I just don’t see a useful lever. To my chagrin, market forces seem determined to have their way with me.

– Mark Barrett

I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. Continuing a series from last week, I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

Assume for the moment you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that at least one person will buy your book no matter what the price is. What price would you set?

Obviously, $AllTheMoneyInTheWorld.

Unfortunately, history suggests a shifting relationship between price and demand (sales), meaning you may not always be able to employ this pricing strategy. As a fallback, it can help to imagine how the relationship between price and sales might play out for your product, given multiple variables. Unfortunately, doing so usually involves a great deal of market research, lots of wild guessing, and facility with a spreadsheet that I don’t have.

One thing I can say about the relationship between the price of my short story collection and sales of my short story collection is that my ability to maximize profit is not a pressing concern. To whatever extent I might be able to squeeze a few more dollars out of the market by endlessly worrying about price, I’m confident the variance between that maximum profit and the average profit is going to be fairly small, simply because the total number of people interested in the product will be small.

Thus liberated by my own limited appeal, it still seems valid to assume that setting a lower price will move more copies, while pricing the content at higher levels will decrease the number of people who buy the e-book. This is obviously why people advocate for the free/freemium pricing model: it promises that the price of your product will not negatively affect demand.   Read more

I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. In this week’s blog posts I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

More than once in my life I’ve had someone tell me they would like to own ItemX. When I asked how much ItemX cost, however, the person replied with, “I don’t know.”

Now, it’s not very often in our commercially saturated lives that we encounter a product which is outside our pricing experience. And that’s particularly true if we know enough about the product to know we want it. Which is why, when this scenario unfolds before me, I invariably respond like this: “Is it a dollar? A million dollars? Ten dollars? A hundred dollars? Ten hundred millions dollars?” And on and on, until the person calmly replies that one of those numbers is close to the mark.   Read more

Earlier today the following quote appeared on Twitter (via Guy Charles and others), regarding Jane Friedman’s keynote interview at PBV:

Friedman on enhanced ebooks: “Vook is read and watch… I’m not interested in disrupting the reading experience; it’s sacrosanct.”

By coincidence, I ran across the following quote at almost the same moment while doing research for the previous post:

There are plenty of people who cringe at the cultural toll, who believe that the loss of books means losing the tactile, absorbing relationship with text we’ve enjoyed for centuries. MIT technology guru Nicholas Negroponte would like to remind them that people resisted indoor plumbing, too.

“They complained that if women didn’t do the laundry beside the river and at the fountain they would be alone, but other things started to serve those social purposes,’’ said Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child program, a festival panelist, and Deborah Porter’s significant other. “The reading experience is becoming more social. There are various ways of interacting on e-readers or computers, where people blog and use Twitter, and where the sharp line between the writer and the reader is going away.’’

I understand both of these perspectives, but relative to the functional merits of books they are both wrong, and both wrong for the same reason.   Read more

Here’s a quote from a piece on e-publishing, titled (provocatively) Why Ebooks Must Fail:

And therein lies the dilemma… how does the publishing industry fund the creation, editing, design, production, marketing, e-warehousing, and sales of ebooks, if the income isn’t there? How do ebooks cover the huge advances needed to buy books if we cannot generate the cash, especially at their extremely low, discounted prices, cover the advances that an entire industry has come to require? The answer is that ebooks, alone, cannot.

Given the assumptions, I can’t really disagree. But the assumptions aren’t a given.   Read more