Short Story Sale – $0.99!
Posted on September 25, 2010
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Ebook Price Wars Solutuon
Posted on September 18, 2010
I’ve got a lot of friends in the UK who were very excited to see the addition of Kindle to the UK store. Kindle, I’ve noticed, has separated out the UK sales from the US sales in our royalties – probably because authors are still getting 35% on their UK sales, while from the US sales, they’re getting 70% (as long as the book is priced between $2.99 and $9.99).
In spite of low author royalties in the UK, Amazon is scrambling to deep-discount books before agency pricing starts to take effect in the UK, as it did in the US (much to most consumers’ chagrin!) It seems that Amazon wants to brand the consumer’s brain with the idea that books should be priced on average at $2.99 – and certainly no higher than $9.99. And while I certainly agree with the latter, I’m not so sure about the former $2.99 price point.
Besides, it looks like Amazon wasn’t quite fast enough. Hachette, the UK’s largest publisher, is taking the same route the Big Six publishers in the U.S. have taken – they are demanding agency pricing from Amazon on Kindle books sold in the UK.
And the price-wars continue…
Will the investigation into price-fixing by the Texas Attorney General come to anything? Who will win in the end? Who knows?
But we all know consumers and authors both lose if books continue to be over-priced the agency way. Some of the forums on Amazon are eye-opening, with consumers threatening boycotts of overpriced books (and their authors). Granted, I happen to think some Kindle folks are a little extreme about ebook pricing, thinking full-length books should be priced at $2.99.
Because ebooks are such an ethereal sort of thing, people are loathe to pay much for them. I get that. After all, you can’t share them with a friend, and there’s always the fear your hard drive may crash (or your ebook vendor will go out of business) and your e-library might disappear. Ebooks don’t seem quite “real” – even if you’re actually getting the same amount/time of entertainment with them that you would with a hardcover.
It’s hard to wrap our heads around paying $9.99 for something that doesn’t quite seem “real.” But think about it – we do that now when we go to the theater to see a movie. (In fact, if you’re into buying popcorn, you pay quite a bit more). And you don’t get to take that movie home with you, or get to watch it again, the way you get to read an ebook.
Now, granted, if you’re a bargain-hunter like me, you can go see a matinee show for $3.75, or the twilight show for $4.75 (your mileage may vary depending on your state – or country – of origin). Or you can wait to buy the DVD and have it to watch over and over (at least until it gets all scratched – am I the only one who misses VHS for that reason?)
So why should a bargain ebook be $0.99 and a full-length novel ebook be priced at $2.99? Could we be down-valuing the medium?
Personally, I think ebooks should be priced based on length. This model has been used by indie ebook publishers for over ten years. (Yes, it’s true, there were thriving ebook publishers and distributors before Kindle!)
Our own eXcessica pricing is based on length:
$0.99 Short Shorts: Under 3K
$1.99 Shorts: 3-7K
$2.99 Stories: 7-15K
$3.99 Novelettes: 15-35K
$4.99 Novellas: 35-50K
$5.99 Novels 50-70K
$6.99 Super Novels: 70-140K
$7.99 Super XL Novels: 140-250K
$8.99 Super XXL Novels: 250K +
It’s a good, and I think fair system for both authors and consumers. I mean, come on – the average candy bar costs $0.99 – and I think a short little story is probably more nourishing than a Snickers.
Remember what you’re paying for – the amount of time you get to be entertained by a book.
In a world where everything has gone Supersize for so little investment – where you can get a Gazillion Ounce Big Gulp Slurpee for $0.99, but “real” food (i.e. an organic apple, for example) costs so much more – we have developed a Wal-Mart mentality where we want everything for nothing.
But the reality is you still get what you pay for – a $0.99 Slurpee is something that took very little energy to produce. The apple, on the other hand, took a long time to grow, and under the loving, watchful eye of an organic farmer.
So with ebooks. A $0.99 book should be a short-short – something it took an author perhaps an afternoon or two to write and polish. A 100,000 word tome that took a writer half of his life to complete, might, perhaps, deserve a little more investment.
There has to be a middle ground between the price-gouging of agency model and the deep discounts of Amazon and Wal-Mart. I think basing ebook price on length might just be the place we’re looking for.
-Selena Kitt
www.selenakitt.com
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Meet The Baumgartners – A Prequel!
Posted on September 15, 2010
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0042RUM9G
Carrie swore off men after a relationship-gone-bad in her freshman year of college and is perfectly happy with her roommate and lover, Maureen – until she discovers Steve Baumgartner (“Call me ‘Doc,’ everybody does”) in a very compromising – and decidedly sexy – position. Meeting Doc complicates things, but when Maureen’s very-religious boyfriend becomes a real threat and the gang goes to Key West for summer break, Carrie finds herself swept away by circumstance into a whirlwind of lust and sexual discovery.
If you’ve read Babysitting the Baumgartners, A Baumgartner Reunion, or Baumgartner Generations: Janie, you’ll love this prequel to the series. If you’ve never read any of them – Meet the Baumgartners! Your life will never be the same again!
Warnings: Let’s see… masturbation, f/f sex, a m/f/f threesome, and it’s ridiculously hot… mostly what you’d expect in an SK story! 
Word Count: 20,007
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LIMITED RELEASE – A KINDLE EXCLUSIVE!
Remember – you don’t need to own a Kindle to read this one! Kindle PC is available for PC or Mac as well, and you can download a Kindle App for almost any ereader.
ENJOY!
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Selling Out
Posted on September 14, 2010
FROM THE SELF PUBLISHING REVOLUTION BLOG:
About a year ago, Fictionwise was acquired by bookseller Barnes and Noble. This is old news. The reaction was mixed, positive and negative. Some thought, well it had to happen some time, as ebooks became a bigger part of the market share, and if Fictionwise was going to be acquired by anyone, at least it was by someone who actually cared about books. Some, though, hated to see the biggest independent ebook retailer sell out to one of the big boys. Up until the surge of Amazon’s Kindle (followed by Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Apple’s iPad) they were the considered THE place to buy ebooks.
But in a free market system, competition is good, right? The consumer never benefits from a monopoly, and in some ways, before the acquisition, Fictionwise was monopolizing the ebook market. Sure, some other distributors (most notably All Romance Ebooks and Omnilit) had come out to challenge them, and were even making some headway, but Fictionwise still had a lion’s share of the market.
Then the acquisition happened, Kindle exploded for Amazon, and the world turned upside down.
Fictionwise had already begun to have some major customer service issues. They were getting pretty big for their britches before the acquisition, ignoring customer and publisher complaints, all the hallmarks of a company who thinks it’s the biggest bully on the block who can get away with it. (Anyone hear Lily Tomlin’s cackle, followed by, “Because we’re the PHONE COMPANY!” in their head, or is it just me?) But even big ol’ Fictionwise saw the writing on the wall about the future of ebooks and sold out to the highest bidder.
They said selling out wouldn’t change anything – Scott Pendergrast, head of Fictionwise, was quoted as saying, “Barnes & Noble (is) fully behind Fictionwise’s philosophy of ‘platform neutrality and eReader everywhere.’”
Hm. Really? A big corporation holding the same philosophy as an independent retailer? Who was he trying to convince exactly?
Then came the extinction of Fictionwise’s Buywise program, due to agency model pricing. It was a great program for consumers, offering 15% off books for members, along with special “micropay rebate†offers. Of course, it wasn’t always so good for the publisher. Fictionwise standard contracts said that royalties to the publisher would be 50% of the sale price, or 25% of the list price, whichever was greater. And the “sale price” was defined as “the price paid by the customer.” Of course, Fictionwise stipulated that the price “may be less than the List Price because of coupons, promotions, or other discounts.”
Promotions like the Buywise program.
The small independent publishers had always complained about Fictionwise’s deep discounts of their books and the smaller percentage of royalties that they received based on those discounts. Unlike Amazon, who only gave a 35% royalty rate to publishers, but always based that rate on the publisher’s set list price even when they discounted a book, Fictionwise passed that consumer savings on to the publisher, much to the publisher’s chagrin. But at the time, Fictionwise was the biggest dog on the e-book block, and volume of sales helped alleviate some of those consumer incentives. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you, and small independent ebook publishers were loathe to complain.
The Big Six, though, weren’t having any of it. With the typical arrogance of the “too big to fail” philosophy of most big corporations, they complained. They wanted to sell their books and receive royalties based on the price they listed. And now that Fictionwise had been acquired by Barnes and Noble, they didn’t have much say in the matter. And the Buywise program bit the proverbial dust.
But that was just the first indication that the biggest independent online retailer’s selling out to one of the big boys might have been a mistake – at least, if they wanted their philosophy about ebooks to continue into the near future, let alone a long-term one.
Then, Fictionwise closed applications to any new publishers wanting to publish directly with them – I was told they were “indefinitely on hold.” I was also told to inquire with Barnes and Noble instead. I know of several publishers who applied and had been waiting six months or more without any response from Fictionwise about their applications, in spite of numerous attempts to elicit one.
And now, Fictionwise is closing all of its branded stores. According to Publisher’s Weekly, Fictionwise boasted about 500 of these store-fronts that were hosted by Fictionwise and enabled customers to view only a publisher’s own titles rather than the entire list of all ebooks sold by Fictionwise. EPIC’s (Electronically Published Internet Connection) own bookstore was powered by Fictionwise – but has since been redirected to www.fictionwise.com. All of the branded stores will reportedly be closed by the end of September.
I can say now that I’m glad I followed my instincts in dealing with Fictionwise from the beginning and didn’t invest the $1000 (that’s right, it cost those who wanted a branded store $1000 for the privilege) to power Excessica‘s storefront. Although I feel sorry for those who did make that investment.
I’m also a little sad, in spite of my difficulty in dealing with Fictionwise over the past few years, to see the end of an era. This, to me, more than the explosion of Kindle, the Coming of the iPad, the scrambling of Borders and Barnes and Noble to keep up, marks the true beginning of the end. Fictionwise, once the largest and most profitable ebook retailer, isn’t going to survive the ebook boom we’re facing, and certainly not in the way they claimed to have hoped.
Perhaps Fictionwise saw the future of ebooks and sold out at just the right time. It was inevitable, wasn’t it, that once ebooks reached a certain share of the market, that the “little guys” just wouldn’t be able to hold their own anymore? Even the biggest “little guys” were going to take a hit or disappear altogether.
But why all the smoke and mirrors? Why not just admit that you sold out, that the impending change in the market necessitated the sale? Instead, we heard platitudes about things staying the same.
I don’t know, but it seems to me the winds of change have taken on the distinct odor of manure.
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WIN A KINDLE 3! Excessica Scavenger Hunt!
Posted on September 1, 2010
eXcessica is giving away TWO Kindle 3 eBook Readers with wi-fi AND they will be already pre-loaded with dozens (75+!) of eXcessica eBooks!
Our scavenger hunt runs from Sept 1 – Sept 30, 2010 and there are LOTS of way to win!
Besides the TWO KINDLE 3 READERS – the following prizes will also be given out:
- * $20 Amazon Gift Card (5 giveaways)
- * The ENTIRE Excessica Anthology Collection to Date (2 giveaways)
- * Excessica Anthologies, given individually (7 total giveaways)
- * A”habu” collection, including Rough Rides, Across the Threshold, Deal Closer, Hard Knocks U and Creampuffs (3 giveaways)
- * A Selena Kitt collection, including The Surrender of Persephone, Heidi and the Kaiser, Bluebeard’s Wife, Taken, Falling Down and Quickies (3 giveaways)
- * And don’t forget to come to the CHAT for even MORE chances to win prizes!
AND GOOD LUCK!
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