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Pricing to Fail: Case Studies in Dumb Pricing – “One Man’s Paradise,” and How Traditional Book Publishers Are Absolutely Killing Off Their Own Emerging Authors

I was friended overnight by a debut novelist named Douglas Corleone, and as I often do I looked over the Amazon pages for both the Kindle edition and the print edition of his new book, One Man’s Paradise.

This breaks my heart.

As Booklist reviewer David Pitt wrote, “This novel won the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award, and it’s no wonder.” And readers apparently agree, based on the 13 5-star reviews that Amazon customers have already given it.

No doubt Corleone was thrilled to win the award, sign a three-book contract, see his first book in print, and do whatever he could to help market the book. I don’t know Douglas Corleone from Charlie Sheen, so I’m just speculating here, but it’s all a pretty heady experience for most writers.

But his publisher Minotaur Books, an imprint of agency model participant MacMillan, may be killing off his career before it really starts by mandating a non-discountable ebook price of $11.99 for a debut novelist without a following.

It’s all well and good for agency model publishers to insist that their offerings that are priced at $10 and above are doing just fine. After all, 8 of the top 20 books on the Kindle Store paid bestseller list are priced above $10.

There’s just one problem. The authors of those eight books are James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Kathryn Stockett, Janet Evanovich, Brad Thor, Laure Ingraham, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Nelson DeMille.

For an unknown debut author trying to connect with the world’s most prolific and committed readers — Kindle owners — the price of $11.99 is the kiss of death. The current Kindle Store sales ranking of One Man’s Paradise is #52,920, which means that it is selling a handful of copies each week, and that it is so far out the long tail that it does not show up on any of the Kindle search architecture’s highly defined category bestseller lists. The hardcover sales ranking, as I write this, is 126,940, which pretty uch means ditto what I just said about the ebook edition.

At $9.99, the Kindle edition of One Man’s Paradise would have a chance. At $7.99, there’s an excellent chance I and others would be raving about it and it would be in, at least, the top 1,000 in the Kindle Store sales rankings. I have nothing against the book’s hardcover pricing, with a list of $24.99 discounted to $16.49 in the main Amazon bookstore, except that I hope that there will be a trade and/or mass market paperback edition soon. Unfortunately, lackluster hardcover and Kindle sales could give Corleone’s publisher all the excuse it needs to under-support, or even pull, a paperback edition.

But wait, you say? By signing with a MacMillan imprint, Corleone has availed himself of serious marketing muscle, right? Won’t he sell a ton of books through brick-and-mortar bookstores, both indies and chains?

Er, not likely. How hard is Corleone’s publisher working for him? Of course I don’t really know, but I can’t help but notice that a Google news search did not come up with a single news media hit on “Douglas Corleone,” and the top hits that came up from a Google web search on the same phrase were for the author’s website, his Facebook page, and a few blogs. The author’s website is playing some wonderful ocean audio for me in the background right now, but it has an Alexa traffic ranking of a little over 18 million, and lower numbers are what we are after here. At this point, it would be optimistic even to expect to find copies in most independent bookstores. Shelf space doesn’t come cheap.

Yesterday I watched a video of publishing executive Colin Robinson’s outrageous ravings (they’re still ravings, even if said with a Brit accent or printed in the next issue of The Nation) that Amazon is killing off publishers and midlist authors (like Corleone, I guess) and must be stopped. Robinson’s commentary is an insult to the intelligence of viewers and readers and will be taken as an embarrassment even by the publishing industry insiders who see it. Myself, I’m just glad that the industry has the benefit of more intelligent analysts and spokespersons like Mike Shatzkin, Random House’s Gina Centrello, and others, so that perhaps I can insist that idiots like Robinson spare me the self-serving b.s. The fact is that it is dinosaur book publishers who have been killing off their own industry and the brick-and-mortar bookstores for years by failing to understand and adapt to changing technologies and readers’ appetites until it is, as now, too late, by failing to support books by mid-list or emerging authors, by investing heavily in dreck, and by forsaking backlist to gamble their houses again and again on mega-bestsellers.

I haven’t read Corleone’s book, but I would bet it’s pretty good. I’m probably not going to spring for it at $11.99, but I will probably download the free sample today and give it a listen on my Kindle. And frankly I am even hopeful that a few Kindle Nation readers who are less price-sensitive than I am will notice this post and give One Man’s Paradise a real chance by buying it and driving it up the sales ranking ladder some.

But what I really hope, both for Douglas Corleone and for countless other authors who are hoping against hope that the book publishing industry as now constituted will give them the career for which their wonderful writing makes them, in my view, truly deserving is that they connect the dots and figure out what is really going on, for authors, in the publishing industry today. I’m not going to the connect the dots for them beyond saying to many authors that you need the services of a traditional publisher about as much as a fish needs a bicycle, but I am happy to provide links to the dots:

The Newbie’s Guide to Publishing (Everything A Writer Needs To Know)

Publish on Amazon Kindle with the Digital Text Platform

A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing Blog

How To Make Money on Ebooks

Beyond the Literary-Industrial Complex: How Authors and Publishers Are Using the Amazon Kindle and Other New Technologies (… to Unleash a 21-Century Indie Movement of Readers and Writers)

Right on Schedule, Amazon Changes the Arithmetic of Publishing By Launching 70 Percent Royalty Option for Kindle Digital Text Platform

J.A. Konrath, King of the Kindlesphere, Gives Big Publishers a Rejection Slip with “Endurance” and “Trapped”

The Ebook Revolution and the Indie Publishing Revolution: Readers and Writers Locking Arms with Comrade Bezos

With Kindle royalties about to be set at 70%, is it time to revisit bestselling novelist Anne Rice’s post: “Should major authors think about making Kindle (if possible) their primary publisher?”

How Should Independent Authors and Publishers Price eBooks?

About eBook Prices and Author Royalties: Price Elasticity and the Demand for Books

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