The Kindle 3 was recently announced with a starting price of $139 for a WiFi version. I thought that was a terribly compelling price for a fantastic e-reader. I still think the price of new e-books are much too high. Currently fourteen of the top twenty Kindle books - or 70% - are priced at $10 or higher. This is for a book with little-to-no cost to produce. Unlike a physical book that must be printed on paper, bound, and shipped, this book is created once and copied practically free of charge to an unlimited number of people.I think the price point which would be most attractive to sell a lot of e-books is $3 to $5. And there are plenty of authors pricing their books in this range, or less. In addition, many new authors, or existing authors trying to attract a new audience, will give their books out free for a limited time.
I subscribe to a weekly email newsletter called The Kindle Nation. It discusses new happenings in the Kindle world and includes links to free and low-priced e-books. It recently began to highlight one exceptional book each week. Today's book caught my attention. I learned about a new vampire book called 33 A.D. by David McAfee. I'm not a huge fan of the vampire genre but the premise of the novel seemed unique. The Amazon description said:
Jerusalem, 33 A.D. The vampires of the era have long sought to gain a foothold into Israel, but the faith of the local Jewish population has held them in check for centuries.
When one of their own betrays them to follow a strange young rabbi from Galilee, the elders of the vampire race dispatch Theron, a nine hundred year old assassin, to kill them both.
The rabbi's name is Jesus. Killing him should be easy.
You can buy the paperback version today at Amazon for $12.81 or download the Kindle version for $2.84. Now that's an attractive price.
Just for the record (and possibly a new thing to learn today), even at $10 publishers (and their authors) make far less on the sale of an e-book than the paper version. Printing and distribution is actually quite a small sliver of the price of a book. The major cost is in sourcing, creating and marketing an enormous number of books that fail miserably. The book industry is incredibly difficult to make money. Publishers are being squeezed. Authors (besides the mega-hit ones) make no money.
ReplyDeleteHaving said all of that, I'd also like to buy other people's books for less than $10. I just wish other people would buy mine for more. :)