Within 5 Years, Digital Books Will Only Cost $0.99
It is amazing to see sales take off when the price falls below some resistance point.
But $0.99 seems very low for a full-length novel. Such a novel probably takes a year to write, and I would have though it was similar in terms of creative effort to a complete album rather than just one song.
See, that’s the magic of volume pricing. When it’s priced to sell at $.99, an author (no doubt indie, because there is no possible way a publisher, with all their overhead, can price like that and still remain viable) gets two substantial effects: They get the “cash register candy” impulse buyer to pull the trigger without much thought; and, because there are alot more of those readers (as evinced by the explosion in sales of ereaders), they make up in volume what they sacrifice in price.
If you’re #60 in the Kindle top 100, you’re selling something like 500 copies a day. These ebooks stay for (afaict) an average of 8 weeks on the charts. So 500 x 56 days = 28000 sales. If you’re pricing at, say $2.99, you’ll get $2.10 a copy after Amazon’s cut. 28000 x 2.10 = $58,800. In 2 months of being on the charts. Not saying everyone will do that, but let’s put it this way: You have as much a chance as anyone with a novel of similar quality and luck. Now, if you wrote 3-4 breezy, genre novels of sellable quality, and you had even 1/4 of the sales, you can see how this volume pricing can provide you with a pretty comfortable living, even if Amazon takes 65% of the 99 cents.
Such a novel probably takes a year to write
That’s the romanticized “Great American” notion of the Novel as singular artwork and the novelist as auteur. It aggrandizes people like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Salinger to the level of genius (which, arguably, is well-deserved), but not every novelist is like that and writes those kinds of timeless classics.
The two darlings of the 99-cent authors, Amanda Hocking and John Locke (yeah yeah…) are absolutely brand-spanking new to fiction writing. She’s written 6 novels, he has 7. Almost all their novels were written within the last year or two (Locke, I believe, never wrote any of his novels before last year, Hocking had one or two of the 6 novels done before hitting it big).
All of their novels are in the top 100 Kindle store, selling, on average, between 500-6000 ebooks a day. Last I heard, Hocking was selling something like 100,000 ebooks a month, priced between 99 cents and 2.99. And, there are hundreds of previously mid-list writers publishing their back catalogs this way and making more on 99-cent or 2.99 ebooks than they ever did as a published mid-lister, even with the modest advances.
There are things you aren’t taking into account here. The biggest one is this: all books are not the same. The Gathering Storm took me eighteen months to write. That’s not a romanticized “Great American” novel. That’s me, writing commercial fiction. True, I hope there’s some strong literary value to it. But at the end of the day, I’m a craftsman—and I’m writing every day, working full days. It just takes a lot of time to create a 1000 page novel.
Selling a book at .99 is one thing if it’s a short book (which the ones selling for that price are) that is very episodic (which they are.) Write a book at 400k words instead of 70k words, and the difficulty of managing plot lines grows exponentially, not to mention the months it takes to worldbuild a realistic epic fantasy world.
Beyond that, Epic Fantasy—which I write—has a shorter ‘amplitude’ than something like Hocking is writing. The biggest bestselling epic fantasies—at any price—sell far fewer copies than the best selling romance or paranormal romance books do. There are fewer people who want to read them, and for those who do read them, time is less of a barrier (to many) than price. You can only read so many books of that length. (Well, you can only read so many of any length, but you get what I mean.)
Even accounting for collectors grabbing everything they can at low prices, if you drop epic fantasy books to $.99, the genre will probably no longer be able to support full time writers. That’s not to say it won’t happen, and maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised at how many new readers we can pick up. But I’m skeptical.
I find the $.99 ebook thing kind of baffling, honestly. We’ll pay $10 to go to a movie, we’ll pay $10 for an album, but we want a book to cost a fraction of that?
Wait wait. Are you saying you’re Brandon Sanderson? I’m honored. I was a big fan of the WoT series but haven’t caught up fully due to no time.
I don’t know if it’s been revealed in TGS, but who exactly killed Asmodean?
It’s me. And the killer of Asmodean is revealed in Towers of Midnight . (Brows through the glossary if you want a ‘quick fix’ answer. It’s in there, though the text of the book makes it pretty clear too.)
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