Lately, I've seen
that meme floating around again, the one where you see the cup of
coffee on one side and an e-reader on the other bringing up the point
that you can get an e-book for the price of a cup of coffee. It asks
that people forgo their coffee to buy a book. I can understand the
premise. Some e-books are around the same price as a cup of coffee,
and books last longer than a cup of coffee.
But I've found most
of the e-books I want are more expensive than my favorite caramel
frappuccino that I get on occasion. This leads me to the fact that I
have a problem with how e-books are priced these days. In some cases
they're almost as expensive (or more expensive in a few cases) than
the paperbacks.
I've been doing
research on e-book pricing (read that as I've gone through and looked
at e-books on Amazon and Smashwords to see if I'm right), and have
come to realize from my, admittedly limited, research that the main
difference in e-book pricing depends on how it's published. Or
rather, who's doing the publishing. In general, I've seen that
self-publishers tend to price their books in the $3-$4 range. Small
presses are around the $4-$5 range. The Big 5 are $5 and up. There
are exceptions to all of these. These are just averages I've come up
with perusing the e-book market on my own.
Another thing that
intrigued me was the percentage of the profits that authors receive.
I can't find the link where I saw it broken down, but I saw that
self-publishers get most of the profits (based on price, the site
algorithms, and where it's being published), small press publishers
get a smaller percentage (but it's still a very good one), and the
traditionally published even less. The last is what baffles me.
There's almost no overhead for them in the publishing of e-books, and
yet from what I remember authors get a very small amount of the
profit from e-books.
I believe that the
pricing of e-books is variable, based mostly on who holds the rights
to the book. It's a little cheaper to support an indie author than a
traditionally published author, but in spite of the occasional trip
to Starbucks (or your treat of choice), it's still possible to
support your favorite authors. And even authors new to you. (That
meme irritates me a little.)
What are your
thoughts on e-book pricing? Have you seen something different than I
have?
Given that I'm self published, I can tell you when I price around 2.99$ I get 70%. If I go 99cents, it's 35%. But from what I know, either percentage is better than what most authors get under a big publisher. One of the reasons I'm glad to be self published.
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