Crime Writer Makes a Killing With 99 Cent E-Books

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Joe Konrath has an interesting interview with independent writer John Locke who currently holds the coveted #1 spot in the Amazon Top 100 and has sold just over 350,000 downloads on Kindle of his 99 cent books since January 1st of this year, which, with a royalty rate of 35%, is an annual income well over $500k. Locke says that 99 cents is the magic number and adds that when he lowered the price of his book The List from $2.99 to 99 cents, he started selling 20 times as many copies — about 800 a day, turning his loss lead into his biggest earner. 'These days the buying public looks at a $9.95 eBook and pauses. It's not an automatic sale,' says Locke. 'And the reason it's not is because the buyer knows when an eBook is priced ten times higher than it has to be. And so the buyer pauses. And it is in this pause—this golden, sweet-scented pause—that we independent authors gain the advantage, because we offer incredible value.' Kevin Kelly predicts that within 5 years all digital books will cost 99 cents. 'I don't think publishers are ready for how low book prices will go,' writes Kelly. 'It seems insane, dangerous, life threatening, but inevitable.'"

Comments

I TOLD you.

[unity100]

not only i told you, but many other people told this as well :

digital goods are easily distributable. make it something cheap that noone will hesitate to pay for, and A LOT of people will buy it - even people who think 'hey i may read/use this in future' may buy it if its 99 cents. same goes for games. a lot of people will buy games that they will never play, just to have them handy, or in their collection, or to have a more complete game arsenal. a lot of people will buy your software if its cheap, just to have it handy if they ever need it to do anything at some random point in time in future.

there is nothing barring you from doing that. the bandwidth costs are low, they are going down and down continually. you dont have to reproduce a digital good. all you need is :

- an easy to use website to buy from, and a short, easy checkout procedure
- a payment provider that is easy to use. (or a reliable credit card payment method)
- a digital download.

its THAT simple. no really, it is THAT simple. and the example is, in the article above.

Re:It's also because of the Lost

[Fnkmaster]

You hear the name John Locke and you think of some TV show? Seriously?? Not the philosopher considered the founder of Liberalism, nor his theories of continuous consciousness or tabula rasa?

Our educational system has truly failed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke

The long tail

[bradley13]

Another thing that publishers are totally screwing up: the long tail. Ebooks give them the opportunity to get some last sales out of older books.

As an example: my kids are reading an old series that contains 20-odd books. These books are no longer in print, but you can easily find them in a used bookstore for about 50 cents each. The original cover prices were $3.00 to $3.50. I thought - hey, we have an ebook reader (Sony), let's see if the publisher has them, and we'll just get the ebooks. I would have happily paid $0.99 per ebook - twice the cost at the used bookstore, but hey, they do have to reformat the things.

Sure enough, the publisher has all of the books on offer as ebooks. Price: $9.99 each, and no extra charge for the DRM.

Is that insane or what? Charging 20 times the price I would have to pay for the physical book (and three times the original cover price). Meanwhile, their DRM is not compatible with our ebook reader. Yes, I could strip the DRM off, but I shouldn't have to.

Faced with such utter stupidity on the part of the publisher, most people will make the obvious choice: it takes only a few minutes to find a torrent containing all of the books - free and without DRM. The pointy-haired managers at the publisher will, of course, draw the wrong conclusion. They will say "piracy costs us sales." In fact, their idiotic pricing and DRM policies cost them sales.