99 Cents

I’m one of the folk who picked this one up… but I haven’t read it yet, because book backlog. It does seem to be a buying pattern of mine to buy the first book in a series cheap (or free), then when I read it, if I like it, I go grab the rest of the series. The trouble is that between the frequency of these first-book-series sales, my own lack of time, and my general tendency to forget books on my hard drive (Calibre is helping with this though), it can be months or years before I get around to that read. I never thought how frustrating that must be for people looking at their sales figures. 🙂

I also don’t know how typical I am, because yes, as it happens, I shop exclusively at thrift stores or mark-down outlets for clothes and until the current car I bought junkers (it’s still used, mind you. It’s just a lot newer and more expensive than my usual. The second car, which I guess I’ll be nursing another year or two out of, is a hand-me-down 1992 Grand Caravan which Will Not Die.) I’m actually more likely to buy full price on books and music than anything else, (even if I do grab sales when I see ’em), because I know so many artists and writers.

I’m trying to get out of the Amazon mentality though. Those markdowns on new items have a price, and just because I can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s a price I want to pay.

Or the sale book could be down a bit in people’s TBR queues, and they might be planning to buy the rest if they like the first one. Purely hypothetically, of course. *koff* *koff*

Trying to read way too much into that 99 cent purchase decision. Of course, that’s what writers do…read way too much into a thing, then write about what sprouts above the compost.

Thing is, at 99 cents, it’s an impulse buy, right there in the checkout lane, so there’s any number of reasons why it got picked up. Though the closer analogy is probably the secondhand bookstore.

I did this very thing with Patrick O’Brian. People have said he was good, that the Aubreu/Maturin books were excellent, and they were correct, so I bought Master and Commander when it was on sale, read it and enjoyed it, but not so much that the rest of the books made it into my full price queue. Oddly enough, David Drakes Aubrey/Maturin homage, his RCN series does. Which is the opposite of the relationship I have with Frazier’s Flashman, and the Warhammer 40k Caiaphas Kane books. I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.

I find the same thing happens across media. I enjoy Harry Potter sufficiently to watch the movies, but can’t really be arsed with the books. Ditto for Game of Thrones.

Another reason I’ve picked up books at 99 cents, though I may well be a minority, is for completeness. I bought Sandman Slim in paperback, bought later books digitally, then bought the first to complete the set. Ditto for The Colour of Magic, owned the paperback, bought the ebook on sale.

I’ve always viewed the secondhand bookshop as the source for authors you’ve heard about and want to try, though not necessarily want to do the full run of, and the 99 cent ebook fits in that same space for me, for the most part.

I’m reminded of the old meme of the stereotypical Harlequin reader: Inexpensive (financial incentive); sharing a common plot progression (no good surprises, but no unpleasant ones either – dependability/predictability incentive); usually short in length (time-saving incentive). Basically, literary popcorn (with no butter or salt).

Personally, I buy rather a lot of 99¢ ebooks, particularly if it’s an author I’ve never read before. For those new authors, I’ll also tend to check out reader reviews on Amazon or Goodreads before I purchase. (Part of that is seeing how well-written the reviews are. If someone who’s able to write a competent, thoughtful review likes a book, I’ll have more trust that I won’t feel disappointed in the actual book. The star-ratings, though, are completely useless; even the worst-written books tend to get mostly 4 or 5 stars.)

The most recent 99¢ book I bought, yesterday, is THE YANKS ARE STARVING, an interesting-sounding and well-reviewed story about the Bonus March on Washington in the 1930’s. I’ve been eyeing it for a while, and previously entered a couple of Goodreads giveaways for it. When I saw it offered for 99¢, I went ahead and bought it.

For established authors, I tend to buy backlist titles, or new titles on a promotional sale, when they’re offered at $1.99. I think the most I’ve paid for an ebook was just under $6 for a 3-in-1 Octavia Butler omnibus. (For a single book, I think I paid $3.99 for some guy’s novella called INVESTMENTS.)

My gut feeling is that, as an established and well-regarded writer, you’d probably get best results in the long-term with a $1.99 minimum price. There’s a certain stigma connected with the 99¢ price, i.e., “This book is only worth 99¢.” The slightly higher price is still a bargain, but gets more respect.

You might want to set the first book in a series, like TO GLORY ARISE, at that $1.99 price point permanently; still cheap enough to catch a lot of casual readers, some of whom will go on to buy and read further volumes. (Readers with a particular interest in seafaring adventures would, I think, be almost as willing to pay $1.99 as 99¢.)

These are people who will spend huge amounts on the best food and drink, but who won’t pay for music or movies either, though they consume that like they consume their beer.