Friday, January 15, 2010

Paperback price lowered to $9.95

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De Bello Lemures has experienced a fairly extreme discrepancy between its Kindle sales performance and its paperback sales performance.

On the Kindle side, it has consistently ranged in the top 1500-9000 or so best sellers in the Amazon Kindle store. It has also been able to hang around in the top 25 or 50 of many of its Kindle store genre categories, with some forays into the top 10. On the paperback side, however, sales have generally been just a trickle, and it has not been uncommon for it to go two or three days between sales. This means its sales rank can never go higher than 100,000 or so, and right now it's floundering in the 700,000 range.

A lot of the difference in sales performance between the two media has to be attributable to price. The Kindle title has been at 99 cents for a while now [and will remain there for the rest of January, at least], while the paperback has been listed at $14.95. There are, not surprisingly, a lot of people who will take a chance on an author they have not read before if it only costs them 99 cents, and fewer people who will do so if it costs them $14.95.

I've decided to lower the price of the paperback to $9.95. I can't really lower it much further than that because of the CreateSpace printing charges. Getting it under $10 will [I hope] be enough of a change to shrink the gap between the two versions a bit. We'll see, I guess.

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