Amazon pricing: Up? Down?
Looks like the Kindle version of Zombocalypse Now is back up to the regular price of $2.99 at Amazon. But the Trade paperback edition has been discounted 10% to 13.46! Progress? Depends on whether you happen to own a Kindle, I suppose.
In extremely related news, I've decided for the time being to stop selling the book through Google's new ebook store. If you've been reading this blog, you know I'm pretty excited about Google coming into the ebook market in general -- especially in light of their platform-agnostic ebook philosophy. The problem, though, was that Google automatically discounted the book from $2.99 to $2.51, and when Amazon got wind of Google's price, they dropped their price to match.
The fact is, independent publishers like Chooseomatic Books don't have any price control in our contracts with the major online retailers -- they're free to charge anything they want for our ebooks and pay royalties based on that amount. We feel that $2.99 is a smoking deal for our books already, and it's a price point that's carefully crafted to be as low as it can possibly be while still bringing in enough revenue to make it worth selling. Amazon is by far our biggest market for ebook sales, and the pricing difference there cost us about $85 in the month of April. Not a huge amount, to be sure, but that number will only go up as sales continue to grow, and if Google was flat-out charging me that every month to sell my book in their store, I'd tell 'em to go screw. This isn't any manifesto against Google in particular. I just don't really sell any books there, so I took a long, hard look at the situation and decided that for now I'd rather have the 85 bucks.
You can still feel good about buying the trade paperback from Amazon no matter how much they decide to discount it -- in general, retailers eat any discount for print books, and we get the same amount per sale no matter what they charge for it. Also remember that Amazon isn't the only game in town, either -- Buy.com , for example, sells Zombocalypse Now for $10.80 (with shipping, it comes to just above Amazon's pre-shipping price). And the print edition is also available at many fine comic and game retailers -- some of them hopefully near you!
In extremely related news, I've decided for the time being to stop selling the book through Google's new ebook store. If you've been reading this blog, you know I'm pretty excited about Google coming into the ebook market in general -- especially in light of their platform-agnostic ebook philosophy. The problem, though, was that Google automatically discounted the book from $2.99 to $2.51, and when Amazon got wind of Google's price, they dropped their price to match.
The fact is, independent publishers like Chooseomatic Books don't have any price control in our contracts with the major online retailers -- they're free to charge anything they want for our ebooks and pay royalties based on that amount. We feel that $2.99 is a smoking deal for our books already, and it's a price point that's carefully crafted to be as low as it can possibly be while still bringing in enough revenue to make it worth selling. Amazon is by far our biggest market for ebook sales, and the pricing difference there cost us about $85 in the month of April. Not a huge amount, to be sure, but that number will only go up as sales continue to grow, and if Google was flat-out charging me that every month to sell my book in their store, I'd tell 'em to go screw. This isn't any manifesto against Google in particular. I just don't really sell any books there, so I took a long, hard look at the situation and decided that for now I'd rather have the 85 bucks.
You can still feel good about buying the trade paperback from Amazon no matter how much they decide to discount it -- in general, retailers eat any discount for print books, and we get the same amount per sale no matter what they charge for it. Also remember that Amazon isn't the only game in town, either -- Buy.com , for example, sells Zombocalypse Now for $10.80 (with shipping, it comes to just above Amazon's pre-shipping price). And the print edition is also available at many fine comic and game retailers -- some of them hopefully near you!
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