Kindle news 03/04/11, Rise of 99-cent Kindle ebook + iPhone-revenue piece

RANDOM KINDLE NEWS - March 4, 2011

""Rise of the 99-cent Kindle e-book" by ZDNet's David Carnoy
  This is a long article covering several aspects of e-book pricing today, which should be somewhat interesting to both budding authors and Kindle owners.

Here's what Carnoy had to say about a case study of experimenting with pricing and revenue share under Amazon's self-publishing models:

' Case study: "Fifth Avenue"
Christopher Smith, who wrote the novel "Fifth Avenue," priced his novel at US$2.99 when he launched it last October. He says that with some social media outreach--he did an iPad and a Kindle giveaway for those who tweeted about the book--and little else, the book quickly reached the Amazon Top 100 and peaked at No. 4. After the initial rise, Smith then decided to drop the price of the book to 99 cents to maintain his ranking in the top 100, which is key to generating sales.

Thanks to some controversy over gay sex scenes in the book that touched off heated discussions in Amazon's Kindle message boards, Smith says "Fifth Avenue" remained in the Top 100 for three months and also has done well on Amazon's U.K. Kindle Store. His sales, he says, are in the "six figures", and he's now represented by an "A-list" agent, Matt Bialer at Sanford J. Greenburger.

"When I went to 99 cents, I was going for longevity," Smith says. Later, when he was firmly planted in the Top 100, he started playing with pricing and listed the book back at US$2.99. For every US$2.99 book he sold on the Kindle, he needed to sell six books at 99 cents to make the same amount of money. While he drifted downward on the best-seller list, if he priced at US$2.99, he says he was making significantly more money.

"To keep the book on the list as long as possible, I'd just switch it back to 99 cents and it would quickly climb the list again," Smith says. "Rinse and repeat. This went on for months." '

Other sections of this article on the trend toward 99-cents pricing include: How we got here; The App Store effect: Price drops; The new pricing sweet spot; Whither publishers?


SATIRE NOT THAT FAR FROM THE TRUTH  !   :-)
"Apple To Take 30% Cut On Voice Orders Taken Over iPhone"
  It starts:

' (Palo Alto, California) Apple announced today that as of March 1st it will take a 30% cut of all commerce done over the iPhone. Apple will use a voice recognition system to monitor all phone calls and transcribe order information so that any company taking voice orders over the iPhone can be billed. The announcement is a clarification of a policy released to developers and publishers last week when Apple indicated that all subscriptions purchased through the phone would be subject to a 30% fee. '

You'll want to read the rest of it at Unconfirmed Sources (Kindle-edition readers will be able to click through the link too.  Press the Menu button there and select "Article Mode" to read it and, when finished, press Menu and "Web Mode" and the BACK button to get back to the blog.)


QUOTE OF NOTE
This is London's Money page writes:

" Referring to Amazon's 'best-selling item ever', the 3G Kindle, Fortune observed: 'The tablet continues to dominate the e-reader market, despite initial fears that Apple's iPad would be a problem.

'Now, it seems many people are buying both, to serve different purposes.'"

No surprise to Kindle users though.


Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's),   DX Graphite

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Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.
UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestsellers, or highest-rated ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

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A new 99c Kindle book. Publisher says E-reader buyers can afford higher book prices.

New Kindle book offerings in the news - PR releases, maybe of interest:

Essondale - by Canadian psychiatrist and novelist David Laing Dawson.
  "Is this hell, or just a psychiatric hospital? Dr. Robert Snow isn't sure.  Waking from a drunken stupor in a small green room, the doctor finds he's on the other side of the diagnosis..."
  Description from PR release.  The book is a small one, at 207 KB file size, so you may want to get a free sample first.
  $0.99  (The paperback is $19.95 and a Used copy is offered for $29.)


Legion by UK Author B.J. Kibble
  Full description from PR release.
  His expensive paperpback, Dry Rain, has 4 customer reviews and 5-stars average from regular readers, so it may be worth trying a free sample of Legion.
  $5.56   (The paperback is $13.95.)

The Consumerist's Chris Walters reports on what a publishing industry expert advised in a piece about e-book pricing written last weekand and, worse, what he said about people who buy e-readers.

 Walters' article links to a summary of Professor (and publisher) Michael Cader's piece written for Publishers Lunch's paywall area.  The Consumerist article is quite long and interested readers ought to go there for the full piece and for the link to a summary at Idealog.com (which consults for the publishing industry), as it's too easy to take things out of context in a very polarized atmosphere.

  Having said that, I will quote a bit from Walters' piece to give the gist of the Consumerist response.

' Among [Cader's] advice to the industry is this one:

"People who can afford an ereading device can afford all proposed ebook prices."

By that, Cader means that it's unreasonable for a consumer to say he can't afford to pay more for an ebook.  Cader and other publishers may be justifiably upset that Amazon rolled their products up into its own marketing for the Kindle, but the truth is that there are plenty of customers who indeed bought a Kindle to save money over the long term.  The idea is to invest in a special device that can serve as the physical manifestation of any book you load onto it.

On a more basic level, what consumers are willing to pay for a device and what they're willing to pay for an ebook are two different matters and can't be compared.  But since Cader is doing so, let's take a look at them... [ A good listing ]
...
So you're right, publisher;  maybe I can afford to buy an ereader device.  That doesn't mean you can jack up the price on your crappy digital copy that currently offers less usefulness than a physical copy, and then hide behind the device's potential and cry, "I want to be treated like I make expensive baubles too!"  Because you don't.  You currently make poorly proofread digital files stripped of most of the qualities that make digital content awesome. '

Then Walters gives some great advice to publishers.

The next point is especially strong:

' For example, the fourth Twilight book came out in August 2008, but as of February 2010 the publisher feels the digital version should cost the same as the hardcover--an astounding $22.99.  (And yes, that publisher's owner is one of the companies arguing for more control over pricing.)

It's true that in the recent spat between Macmillan and Amazon, the publisher pointed out that it would price new releases at $15 or less--but based on past pricing patterns, there's no reason to believe that any publisher would subsequently drop the book to a $10 or less price point after it's been out for a while. '

Do go read this.  And, in the meantime, maybe write acknowledgement notes to Random House for supporting customers against the 'Agency' plan.
  Random House's imprints include Crown, Knopf/Doubleday, Ballantine, Bantam, The Modern Library, Fodor's Travel, and many others.   See the Kindle Community Forum topic for the full listing.

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LINKS FOR SEARCHING FOR FREE OR LOW-COST E-BOOKS
  As ever, here is the ongoing set of links for various Searches for free or low-cost Kindle-compatible books. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

Send to Kindle

(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
If interested, you can also follow my add'l blog-related news at Facebook and Twitter
Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!