I run into writers who think the reason their book isn’t selling is the price. The first question, when a new release isn’t working, revolves around discounting. “Should I make this ebook 99 cents?” or “Should I give this away for free to generate interest?”
These are both solid strategies when used the right way, but they’re not magical. I’ve got a reader full of free ebooks I’ve picked up over the last decade, and many more deals I got for 99 cents.
I read very few of these free and low-cost books, and rarely do the ones read incite a desire to go find more work by the author.
At best, the author or publisher has made 35 cents out of my curiosity. At worst, I’m one of the masses some indie authors derisively call “freebie seekers” and deride as a plague on their business.
Here’s the thing to keep in mind: the actual cost to readers isn’t the price you put on your book. It’s the hidden costs involved in reading a new author:
We don’t talk about these things out loud, but they’re part of the calculation every reader makes when deciding whether to buy, and then read, a new title by the author. Your price point isn’t a barrier–it’s a hurdle.
Do I think your book will provide value when weighted against all these hidden costs? Is that promise worth more than whatever price point you’ve put on the cover?
Some books are a steal at $9.99 or $19.99 or $89.99 if I value them enough. I’ve got a shelf full of special editions that suggest I have absolutely no sticker shock with exceedingly pretty books from authors I already love.
Other books are shithouse value when measured against those criteria, even if I downloaded them for free or got them on a discount. The price might be right, but the time and effort required to read them isn’t, and I actively resent their presence on my reader.
Here’s the thing that’s often left out of a discussion about prices, via Paul Ardoin:
Finding a book to read is a chore. Sometimes you can be lucky and a friend recommends something that you think sounds good, or maybe your book club’s next monthly selection is on your bookshelf or is only an e-reader click away, but too often, a search for a new book requires wandering around in a virtual bookstore looking for something you think you’ll like. (Ardoin, From Zero to Four Figures: Making $1000 a Month Self-Publishing Fiction)
While we’re primarily talking about books here–I’m a publisher and a self-publisher, so the spaces I work with are primarily book-related–it’s equally applicable to any other product a writer produces. How much should we charge for courses? For online communities such as Patreon? For events and reader gatherings?
The price point is never the enticement–it’s the hurdle. The trick to selling someone on your work is making your work more valuable to the reader so they’re willing to jump that hurdle and trust you with their time, their focus, their reputation, and their sense of self.
How do you increase the value of your book? A full accounting of strategies is impossible to cover in a newsletter (or, for that matter, a full-length book), but here’s some tactics to get you started.
I’m going to repeat Paul Ardoin’s key point from the earlier quote here: Finding a book to read is a chore.
When you offer readers a deal, the promise isn’t just the value of the book–it’s the promise that if they read this book and like you, they can keep reading this new author they like and get the same experience over and over.
The value of your free book becomes “I can spend less time on this chore of finding something to read” because they’ve got a new author they trust.
Discounting your first book soon after release is often less valuable than discounting it after ten books, because when you’ve got a ten-book backlist, there’s nine other books to pick up if a new reader likes your work. You’ve relieved them of the chore of finding something new that they might like.
So much advice for self-publishers revolves around this: your first step is building up a backlist. Finishing a series, or just getting enough books out, to help magnify the value of other marketing efforts.
If your first book isn’t selling, the next trick is writing the next one (If that sounds daunting because your first book cost an arm and a leg to release…well, it’s time to do things cheaper this time. My first piece of advice to many self-publishers is stop spending so much on your books…).
Discounts–or offering books for free–often jump out as the obvious solution to bringing readers to your work, but it often misunderstands the challenges books that aren’t selling face.
Great deals need to be accompanied by deep reach to convert them into sales–and this applies whether the book is 30% off, 50% off, 99 cents, or free. If nobody knows about the book, the price is immaterial–you need more outreach rather than lower prices.
The second issue is a whole knot of psychological phenomena around pricing, which includes our tendency to anchor value based on first experiences, the way short-term sales re-set the is-this-valuable-to-me-at-this-price calculations readers do in a favourable way, and even th4 way we react to free.
Digging into these is beyond the scope of this essay, but I can recommend Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational if you want a decent primer in consumer psychology.
The core lesson, though, is this: if you usually use a high price point, then bring the price down to cheap or free for a limited time, you’ve created a short-term impulse for people to take up the deal.
It also creates a short-term event that makes it clear why you want people to pay attention now, which is incredibly useful for driving leads to the offer. If your book is free or 99 cents forever, there’s no urgency to taking up the offer.
If it’s free for exactly 24 hours for people who want to give your work a try, then people have to work out whether they want it now and make an immediate decision.
Like most advice, this is predicated on the context of publishing right now. Go back a decade, when ebooks were still new, and the market wasn’t as flooded, releasing permanently free books was a hugely important strategy because the market wasn’t as flooded.
These days, organic search is more restricted and there are considerably more options out there. When generating your own reach through advertising, newsletter swaps, or similar tools, then limited runs make more sense.
The velocity side of the book industry–what most people think of as “traditional” publishers–is built around selling a huge number of books in a very short space of time.
Typically, less than four weeks, which is how long you can reasonably expect a physical book to spend on the shelves of a local bookstore before the next wave of new releases takes its place.
This means traditional publishers excel at making books feel incredibly valuable in the months prior to their release. They want to generate buzz and publicity, ensuring there’s a crowd of eager readers ready to show up and plonk their money down on day one.
When velocity publishing gets things right, they do this exceptionally well, but they use a suite of tools to do it.
These include getting the books into the hands of tastemakers and advanced readers, generating pre-release reviews, sending authors out to do interviews and guest blogs, and asking other authors whose names people recognise to write complimentary blurbs about the new release.
These things require time, money, and connections to pull off, but they’re enormously effective.
The blacklist-driven side of the industry–what most people think of as “indie”, but also many small presses–can’t deploy the same resources for pre-release reach.
Fortunately, they also don’t need to. When you remove the one-month expectation of the sales model, you have literal decades to build up the attention around a book and generate social proof.
You can take your time building up a review base, use tools like newsletters to get fans talking and reviewing, and build up friendships with other authors who might offer to lend you their social sway via blurbs, newsletter swaps, and more.
The challenge here is decoupling yourself from the velocity mindset, and assuming it all needs to be done right now.
Back in 2016, Jeff Jarvis posted an amazing insight based on his first VidCon:
I learned at Vidcon that what we call content is not an end-product. It is a social token. It is something that people make, remake, or pass around to say something about themselves or their relationships with their friends. It might speak for them or it might illustrate their opposition to an idea. It serves their conversations. It is not a destination. (Jeff Jarvis, What I Learned At Vidcon)
Books are no different. They’re an experience, but they’re also an identity–from the way people think of themselves as “readers” through to the way we curate bookshelves. We display books to show people who we are, or who we’d like to be.
Case in point: BookTok has brought the aesthetics and identity of reading to the forefront in a way we’ve not seen in decades, and you can position yourself as a certain kind of reader based on which BookTok books you’ve read, enjoyed, or hated.
Sure, you may not be on BookTok, but are you on Goodreads? Have you ever posted about a book on social media? Do you have bookcases in places where visitors to your house will see them, and do you care how the books are arranged? Do you have a favourite bookshop you visit?
We care about what books say about us. If they didn’t, there’d be far fewer people online debating what it means that they loved Harry Potter or The Sandman considering recent revelations about the author’s personal behaviour.
Reader communities are places where we can reaffirm our identity as a fan of a particular artist and engage with others who share that identity. These days, folks immediately start thinking of Facebook Groups or tools like Patreon as the site for these, but your community can be anything.
Blogs can be community hubs, if they’re a place people come to engage. So can most forms of social media. If you’re there, being active and engaging, supporting the community identity forming around your work, then you’re providing a clubhouse where your community gathers.
Some tips for creating community, based on Nathan Rabins’ book You Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, where he spent a year around the fans of cult bands like Insane Clown Posse and Phish.
There’s definitely way more you can do (see 9 Lessons over at Fast Company for more), but that’s enough to get started.
Yeah, no shit. They’re slow and steady tactics, not quick fixes. You’ll be implementing them over years, not hours, and they require some maintenance.
Especially if you’re an indie or a small press, rather than working with a velocity publisher looking to build you up fast.
But here’s where I get to one thing I’m against here at GenrePunk Ninja: doing things fast at the cost of making less money with your writing.
Especially when you’re a backlist business, rather than a velocity publisher.
I released my first ebook in 2005. It still sells, and it still sells at full price, because it’s had 19 years to build up value or find its readership. You have literal decades to sell books at full price, assuming you’re willing to be patient and build up the value around your work with each release.
You have a long time to sell your book at full price. Maybe try a few things to make it more valuable to a reader before you cut your profits down to nothing and make your next book harder to produce.
You might sell less books right now by keeping your book at full price, but it’s still waiting there, ready to be found by every new reader who discovers your work.
Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:
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