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Recently, after lis­ten­ing to the advice of Smash­words founder Mark Coker, I decided to raise the price of one of my books, WHAT’S IN A NAME? from 99 cents to his sug­gested min­i­mum price of $2.99. I thought I’d share my rea­son­ing, and my very pre­lim­i­nary results.

One thing I’m not going into is reader per­cep­tion of value. There are those who feel that read­ers won’t buy 99 cent books, because they shout out “indie pub­lished, prob­a­bly low-quality” ver­sus those who snap up 99 cent books because they can try new authors with lit­tle finan­cial risk. I have no idea where the “truth” lies. I do know that on Ama­zon, my best sell­ers hap­pen to be my 99 cent books. So why change?

WHAT’S IN A NAME? is one of my few non-series books. It was doing well enough, even crack­ing the top 100 in Roman­tic Sus­pense at Ama­zon. (And, for what­ever rea­son, it’s my worst sell­ing book at Barnes & Noble, so I’m only look­ing at Ama­zon num­bers here.) Some days it was in the 70’s, other days it wasn’t in the top 100. Over­all rank­ings went as high as about 1500, but for the most part, it ranked some­where between the 1700s and the low 2000s, and was my high­est sell­ing book, closely fol­lowed by WHEN DANGER CALLS.

In another post, I men­tioned that rank­ings are based on com­par­isons of your book’s sales with other sales over a time period. So, one day, sales of 50 books might do lit­tle to raise rank­ings, because other books were also sell­ing lots of copies. Another day, 20 sales might send you up into the top 100 for your genre. And, of course, a lot depends on how many other titles are in that genre, or sub-genre.

Nook Con­test Ques­tion #6 (Remem­ber to use the Con­tact Form to answer the ques­tion, and put “Nook Con­test” in your response.)
In Deadly Secrets, who was the mur­der victim?

And, back to today’s post:

But what about the other side? Actual sales, not rank­ings, are what gen­er­ate roy­alty dol­lars. So, you have to ask your­self, what are your goals? To see your book high in the rank­ings, or to see money in your bank account?

For this post, I’ll com­pare my two 99 cent nov­els, before and after the price hike. It’s still very early on, but I thought I’d share what’s happening.

As far as money goes, Ama­zon pays 35 per­cent on books priced below $2.99. This means that each sale of a 99 cent book gen­er­ates about 35 cents for the author. At prices $2.99 and above, the rate is 70%, which means sell­ing a book gives the author $2.09. To gen­er­ate the same money, it takes 6 books at 99 cents to equal 1 book at $2.99.

Rank­ings for WHAT’S IN A NAME? are now at the 5000 level, which is def­i­nitely a drop. Where it sta­bi­lizes remains to be seen.
WHEN DANGER CALLS is bounc­ing in and out of the top 100 in Action Adven­ture; it’s in the 3000’s in over­all rank­ings.

What about sales? Prior to the price change, WHAT’S IN A NAME? was sell­ing about 40 copies per day, with a net roy­alty of just under $14. After the price change, the daily sales dropped to about 20 books a day. You can prob­a­bly do the math. Roy­al­ties come out to about $42. In fact, to main­tain my prior rate of $14/day, sell­ing 7 books a day would be the break-even point. Should my sales drop below that, I’ll prob­a­bly con­sider low­er­ing the price again.

Do I mind not being able to brag about my top 100 book? Not really. For now, I like watch­ing my bank bal­ance rise instead of my rankings.

Only time will tell what hap­pens over the next sev­eral months. I’ll def­i­nitely be watch­ing the num­bers, and I’ll be back with updates.

What about you? As writ­ers, is it more impor­tant to see your book on the best-seller lists, or are you watch­ing the bot­tom line? And, yes, of course I’d love to have both!