Daily Diary, May 18, 2022, Day 626:
As I’ve been explaining in these series of posts, the key reason I chose to become an independent author was the control I would have over my books, including control over editing, the titles, and covers. Looking back at the twelve years since I first published Maids of Misfortune, I can see that controlling the price of my books (especially ebooks and audiobooks) has been crucial to my success. Pricing is also an element of publishing that traditionally published authors seldom have any input into at all, and I believe it is also the area where the goals of traditional publishers deviate the most from the goals of authors.
The prestige of getting a contract from a traditional publisher, winning an award, or seeing their book in bookstores may be important to many authors. However, for most authors who want to make a career of writing, their primary goals are to get their work read and enjoyed by as many people as possible and to make a living wage with their writing.
While profitability is without question the main goal of the major traditional publishers (which are owned by large multinational corporations), the income of most of their individual authors—especially midlist authors––is not the driving factor behind their decisions, particularly when it comes to pricing. Instead, traditional publishers continue to emphasize the importance of selling print books and sustaining the existence of brick and mortar bookstores, even if this emphasis leads them to price ebooks and audiobooks so high that this limits the sales of these books and thereby the income of their authors.
One of the most effective ways of getting people who like to read ebooks to try a new author or book is to provide a competitive price and/or major discount. Because ebooks don’t “go bad” (get returned or go out of print), as an indie author, I have time to experiment with price points and different kinds of promotional prices, to see what works best. This is one of the best aspects of indie publishing, I get to make multiple leaps of faith when I experiment, but I can also change my mind quickly, if something isn’t working.
I started out pricing Maids of Misfortune at $2.99, considerably less than the competing books on the historical mystery category in 2010 (which were traditionally published.) I also priced my first short story, Dandy Detects at 99 cents, and in July 2010, this story was offered free through one of the first Kindle promotions sites—which drove so many people to then go on and buy Maids of Misfortune that it zoomed to the top of that historical mystery category, where it stayed for over a year.
Over time, as these first books and subsequent books in the series garnered strong positive reviews, I have increased the regular price on my full-length novels to $5.99 and made Maids of Misfortune permanently free as my loss leader. I have also continued periodically to reduce the price of my other books to 99 cents or to free for short term promotions. These promotions always end up increasing the number of reviews and increasing the sales of the other full-price books in the series.
One of the fears some authors have had is that making a book free will result in people getting the book when it really isn’t a good match, resulting in bad reviews. While I have seen some evidence in this—Maids of Misfortune has a slightly lower over-all rating than my other books––nevertheless, with 4400 reviews on Amazon it still has a respectable 4.2 rating.
Instead, what offering this first book free and being able to do discounts on the other books has done is build up a fan base for the series so that for the last two books in the series, I’ve have never had to discount, and they still get good sales and a good number of reviews.
For example, the latest book, Entangled Threads, which came out at the end of January, has already sold over 3000 ebooks and has 364 reviews and a 4.7 rating on Amazon. I would never have had this success without being able to keep the price of my books competitive and without being able to do periodic promotions to keep my series books visible in categories such as historical mysteries and mysteries with an amateur sleuth.
And I can change my strategy when the publishing environment changes. And, believe you me, between 2010 and 2014, the online and ebook publishing environment changed a lot. Since I was in control of my pricing (and where I sold my books) I was able to keep up with the changes.
First change: Soon after it started its KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) service for independent authors, Amazon decided that it would give authors 70% percentage of their sales price, but only if they priced their ebooks between $2.99 and $9.99. Otherwise, the percentage was (still is) 35%. They also didn’t allow an author to make a book free. As with most of their decisions, particularly in the early years, this was based on data that said books that were priced in this range sold the best. For Amazon, particularly in those first years, their stated goal was to get as many people to buy ereaders as possible, and having a large volume of ebooks available at low prices was the way to do that.
The second change: Independent authors began to experiment with pricing their books at 99 cents or doing free promotions of their ebooks (which they could do through Smashwords and other retailers—and then Amazon would make the Kindle edition free in something called price matching.) These experiments proved to the authors and to Amazon that the volume of sales at 99 cents and the sell through to full-priced ebooks from the free promotions could more than made up for the loss in revenue with the discounts. Amazon’s response was to create the KDP Select option at the end of 2011.
With KDP Select, an author can discount a book to 99 cents for 7 days (with the full 70% cut) or even make the book free for 5 days. However, in exchange for these promotional tools, the ebook has to be sold exclusively with Amazon (this contract is for 3 months at a time.)
Third Change: July 2014, Amazon started a subscription service called Kindle Unlimited (for a monthly fee a reader gets unlimited access to a certain catalog of ebooks.) Only those ebooks that are in KDP Select (exclusive to Amazon) are enrolled in KU, and the authors get paid for “pages read,” if their books are downloaded by KU subscribers. This model was designed to attract voracious readers as well as provide an additional motivation to keep authors exclusive with Amazon. It also began to undercut sales to books not enrolled in KU.
During all these changes, I paid close attention to what other authors were doing, how they responded, and also spent a good deal of time analyzing my own sales patterns, experimenting with different strategies. As a result, I was able to use the opportunities (putting books into KDP Select and doing promotions) to keep my books high enough in categories so they continued to be discovered by the every growing number of people who had started to read ebooks and discover the books they wanted to read online.
The result was that my revenue in 2011, my second year of publishing, with only two books published tripled, and I now made enough money to completely retire from my day job. In 2012, still with only two books, my income tripled again, and in 2014, with three books published, I hit the highest revenue in my writing career (and near to what I had been making in my day job.)
This pace of growth did eventually slow, as competition, changing Amazon algorithms, my slow publication schedule, the introduction of Kindle Unlimited, etc. began to hurt my total sales and revenue. But again, because I had control, I was able to respond to the changes, making decisions about whether to keep my books in KDP Select, whether or not to make my first in series permanently free, whether or not to give promotional sites like Bookbub a try.
And I wouldn’t have been able to make any of these decisions if I had been a traditional author and had no control over my prices. And since competitive prices, and occasional discounts are what has helped my books be discovered online. But that discovery is also based on those books being in the right category—another area where being an independent author has given me important control. And that will be the topic of my next post on my indie journey.
If you want to read about my decisions in terms of pricing and promotions these first years, you might look at these long posts I did at the time.
The Great Price Debate (May 2011)
KDP Select Free Promotion-Discoverability (January 2012)
7 Things Joining KDP Select Can and Can’t do for you (January 2013)
Don’t Panic: KDP select still works (March 2013)
Time for a Pivot: Kindle Unlimited and Marketing (December 2014)
Great info. I passed it along to a couple (3) Indie authors I know and they appreciate what you are saying. Looking forward to the next one!!
"I get to make multiple leaps of faith when I experiment, but I can also change my mind quickly, if something isn’t working." I like this part. Will be returning to read some of your longer posts on pricing! Thank you!