I just thought a quick post updating the book pricing might be interesting. A couple posts back, I wrote that Amazon’s ebook price for DARK CITY by F. Paul Wilson was $8.54, more than my arbitrary max for a fiction ebook for myself.
So I waited. I received a ten-dollar gift card from Barnes and Noble for Christmas, and yesterday I went into their store to browse a bit. There was DARK CITY, retail price $8.99. With my 10% member’s discount, it was already down to $8.09, less than the ebook price. Okay, you might say that I already paid for that $0.90 discount with the $25.00 membership fee, and you’d be correct. But then I also had a 20% coupon that came via email that day. When I was not a member of B&N’s program, I rarely received coupons, and almost never received 20% coupons, except maybe at Christmas. Plus, the $25.00 is a “sunk cost” whether I buy the book from Amazon as an ebook or from Barnes and Noble as a trade paperback.
With my 10% and the additional 20%, the cost of the book dropped to $6.47 (plus an 8.75% sales tax). (I also bought remaindered editions of Evanovich’s 19th Stephanie Plum, a Joe Pickett novel from C.J. Box, a Robert Crais novel and a Jeffrey Deaver novel, each at 10% off their already low price, three at $5.98 and one at $6.98, so I got an additional $2.50 off besides the $0.90 on the Wilson title. A total of $5.02 off with the coupon.)
Now watch: I’ll go to Amazon next week and DARK CITY will be $3.99.
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UPDATE: I went to the Amazon page to see what the price was today. Instead of it being $8.54, it had gone up to $8.99, the exact same cost as the MMPB. All I can do is shrug…
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I’ve had similar experiences. Unfortunately, it’s hard to be a smart shopper. I have a TBR list of books I’d like to buy, but it grows too fast and becomes too unwieldy to check. I think there’s probably a niche for an app that does that automatically for the reader. Are you listening, Bezos or Coker?
Your post reaffirms my diagnosis that my two Infinity ebooks, Survivors of the Chaos and The Midas Bomb, aren’t competitive in price, by the way. For the former, I’m debating on a second edition, perhaps bundled with the rest of the trilogy. I’d be willing to hear opinions about which tactic would be better received. For the latter, bundling the novel with all the other C&C novels is out of the question, so only the second edition is viable. With time…and money…sigh.
r/Steve
Well, since I have the rest of your books on Kindle (even THE MIDAS BOMB), I would prefer it as an standalone book rather than a bundle. The others in the series were inexpensive enough to purchase on their own. But I can see the advantages (in terms of new readers and the possibility to receive more money for each bundle sold, as opposed to someone buying one and liking it, but maybe not enough to rush out and buy the rest). You already have that second scenario right now with the first two books of the series.
Any reason to not do both?
Yep, I could do both. Extra work for me. I don’t know about other authors, but I struggle with going back to previously released work. Even Evil Agenda, which I first serialized on my website, was difficult to return to in order to make a standard ebook release. I have to get beyond that hurdle, I suppose, but I’ve always tended to look forward, not back…maybe to compensate for my glass-half-empty attitude? 🙂