Experimenting with prices

So now that the last Star Wanderers novella is out and I’m hard at work on the next book, I’m thinking very seriously about experimenting with my prices. I haven’t done a lot of price experimentation, especially since writing became my main source of income about six months ago. I just recently landed a job to save up some money, though, so that gives me a little more space to try things out.

Right now, I’ve basically got three pricing tiers for ebooks: novels and omnibuses at $4.95, novellas at $2.99 (especially Star Wanderers), and short stories at $.99. My best sellers by far have been the Star Wanderers novellas. Now that Part VIII is out, though, I’ve noticed that fewer people who start the series are going through and finishing the whole thing. I’ve also got a fair amount of pushback in the reviews, saying that the $2.99 price for the novellas is too high.

The tricky thing is that at any lower price point, my royalties take a huge hit. At $2.99, I get a 70% royalty from Amazon and a 65% royalty from pretty much everywhere else. At anything less, I get a 35% royalty. That means that at $1.99, I have to sell three times as many books to make the same as I would from one $2.99 sale. At $.99, I have to sell six times as much.

But wait, it gets trickier. The general consensus (inasmuch as there is a consensus about any aspect of epublishing) is that $1.99 is a dead price point. In other words, a book priced at $1.99 will sell so many fewer copies than a book priced at $.99 that they earn less revenue. A $2.99 book may also sell less than a $.99 book, but the increased royalty rate makes up for the shortfall.

Up until this point, my pricing strategy has been to maximize revenue, so that I can have more time to write. That worked fairly well: I put out one novel and four novellas in 2013, finished up the Star Wanderers series, and started a number of other projects that will hopefully bear fruit in 2014. But now that Star Wanderers is complete, I think it might be time for a change in strategy.

What I’ve learned in the past month is that readers will drop out of a series early if 1) the series is long, and 2) the individual parts in the series are priced relatively high. A lot of readers either drop out after Part II or pick up the omnibus, but the ratio of sales between Part II + Omnibus I-IV and Part VIII frankly isn’t that great. From Part V to Part VIII, it’s almost 1:1, but a lot of readers are dropping out right at the beginning–a lot more than when there were only four parts.

Part of this may be that the story just isn’t engaging that many people, but another part may be that the price has become something of an obstacle, especially as readers look ahead at all the other books in the series. Length probably also plays a role–my Star Wanderers books are fairly short, leaning more toward the low-end of the novella spectrum. Combined with the fact that many full-length sci-fi novels are now priced at $2.99, that probably only makes readers balk all the more.

I want to see what will happen if I drop the price low enough that it ceases to be an obstacle. Will fewer readers drop out after the first couple of books? Will more of those readers move on to my other books? Exactly how much of a hit will my revenue take?

For all of these reasons, I’m going to drop the price of my individual Star Wanderers novellas to $.99 for a month to see what happens. To keep the omnibus price competitive, I’ll drop it to $3.79 and release the second omnibus at $3.79 as well. I will raise the list price of the print editions, though (mostly to shoot for extended bookstore distribution), and probably raise the price of my novels from $4.95 to $5.99.

I have no idea how this is going to turn out, which makes me kind of nervous. Since I want to move on to other projects, though, including a spinoff series that I hope to launch later this year, I think it’s more important to encourage readers to read through Star Wanderers as a whole without putting any potential obstacles in their way.

So yeah, that’s the plan. We’ll see how it goes. I’m open to any feedback or ideas, so if you have any thoughts to share either as a reader or as a writer, please don’t hesitate.

By Joe Vasicek

Joe Vasicek is the author of more than twenty science fiction books, including the Star Wanderers and Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus. He claims Utah as his home.

4 comments

  1. Hm. Give it a try, I suppose, but I struggle to see the advantages of the $0.99 price point other than attracting bargain bin buyers. I think $2.99 is a good price for your work – I’d be willing to pay that much for a short story, and your work is significantly longer than that.

    1. Yeah, I’m sure it’ll attract some people from that market segment, but if it increases the read-through rate for the rest of the series and/or leads readers to my other books, I think it will be worthwhile. If Star Wanderers was my only series, I would keep the prices in the 70% royalty range, but I’m going to launch quite a few new books in that universe this year, so from an overall strategic viewpoint it’s much more important right now to build an audience. Plus, plenty of readers who normally trawl the bargain bins are willing to shell out good money for the authors they love. The hope is that removing price as an obstacle for Star Wanderers will help to win over those sorts of fans.

      Thanks for the vote of confidence, though. One thing I was worried about was that dropping the price would make the people who bought the books at $2.99 feel cheated, so it’s good to know that that there are readers who feel that that was still a good value.

  2. I bought the whole star wanders series once I saw the price change. I think most multiple book/novella series in the 50 – 80 page range seem to be priced at $0.99, which I find much much more reasonable than $2.99. I’d actually be willing to pay more than $3.79 for the omnibus since I prefer them. Basically, fewer individual books on my kindle fire for me to sort through (especially since the newer kindle models don’t have good bookshelves or tagging programs). Just my thoughts, thanks for the price change though.

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