C.’s Comments (group member since Jul 11, 2012)

C.’s comments from the Q&A with C. Dennis Moore group.

Christopher wrote: "I haven't jumped into the ebook publishing pool yet, but when I'm buying I never viewed $0.99 as "bargain bin" pricing. I always felt that was a good price. I can only speak for the people I know w..."

That's sort of how I've been looking at it, too. I've bought many ebooks, but unless it was someone I was already familiar with, I've had a hard time paying more than $1. But, hell, I've gone as high as $5 for a single story, if I really loved the author.

But looking at this issue from an author's perspective . . . if I price my ebooks at only $0.99 on Amazon, I only get, what is it, 30% of that in royalty from each purchase? To get a 70% share, Amazon requires you to price it at at least 70%. So from an author's perspective--and we are authors--why should Amazon get the majority of my royalty because they hosted the site where the purchase was made? Sure, they make things easier for readers to stumble across my work, but technically, if I really WANTED to, I could publish an ebook on smashwords, download the Kindle file to my own computer at no cost, and then email the thing free of charge to myself to anyone who wants to buy it from my for $0.99 that they deposit into my paypal acct, and keep all of it. And those numbers would in turn be a whole lot more accurate than I suspect Amazon's numbers are.

Why don't I? For one, visibility. I know a lot more people will see my book on Amazon than will just happen to come to my page and decide to buy it. Plus, it's just simpler to write, publish, then step back and let someone else handle the transactions.

And to do that, I have to pay Amazon either 30% or 70% of my royalty, depending on where I price the work.

Sometimes I really miss the days before ebooks.

What's the general opinion of ebook pricing? I've switched back and forth between schools of thought, at first convinced there was nothing at all wrong with short stories being free and/or $0.99 per. But the more opinions I read from others, the more I came to see a lot of people view the $0.99 stories as being from the "bargain bin" and pass them up automatically. I've got most of my ebook shorts at $2.99 now, but nearly every one of them also contains a backup story, and the two that don't are over 7000 words and, in my opinion, worth the $2.99 cover price. I do still have a few shorts at the $0.99 price point, but those are short stories, published alone with nothing else.

Anyway, what is everyone else's opinion on ebook pricing?

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