Bargain Books mentioned in this post:

Every now and then I say something here that makes perfect sense to me, and lo and behold, it turns out to be wrong.

There’s nothing newsworthy about that, but here is a case where I was wrong and it turns out to be great news for the greatest readers in the world, the citizens of Kindle Nation.

A few months ago, in some writing that I did in several blog posts here and in an ebook for authors and publishers on how to price ebooks in the Kindle store, I took a rather strong position to the effect that anyone who priced a Kindle book below $2.99 uner the new Kindle Store royalty structure had to either be smoking something funny or had to have a very specific marketing strategy that did not involve maximizing his royalties on the book in question. The arithmetic was clearly behind me: since Amazon pays independent authors and publishers twice the royalty rate for Kindle books priced between $2.99 and $9.99, inclusive, that it pays for ebooks priced outside that range, an author would have to sell six times as many 99-cent books to make the same royalty she would make on a book priced at $2.99.

Wrong again, buffalo breath. Well, I mean, there’s certainly something to the point I was trying to make, and arithmetic has not changed, but here’s what I underestimated:

The citizens of Kindle Nation are on the lookout for bargains and ebooks priced at 99 cents can really stand out if they come highly recommended, highly rated by Amazon customer reviewers, and/or otherwise highly appealing in some way in their overall presentation. I’m definitely not saying that 99 cents is the new free, because 99 cents is 99 cents, but it is very close.

So, one of the things that I have noticed especially among some of the very smart authors and publishers who have stepped up to the plate to serve as sponsors of Kindle Nation is a strategy that seems to be working well for readers and authors again and again:

If an author wants to gain attention for several books in a series, it can be a very smart strategy to price one book — possibly the first book in the series — at 99 cents, with subsequent books priced competitively, which usually means between $2.99 and $5.99.

Of course, success is not guaranteed at that point. There are two elements that are essential if the strategy is to succeed:

But when it works, it really works. Here are ten very good ebooks, each priced at 99 cents, that have helped or should soon help their relatively prolific authors catch the attention of readers for their other titles.

The great thing, to my mind, about all this is that it isn’t just great for authors and publishers. It’s terrific for readers, too, because we have a chance to discover new authors that we are likely to keep in our reading rotations for years to come.

And, by the way, this strategy is already gaining the attention of traditional publishers, too, including the sinister forces behind the agency-model publishers and more forward-thinking publishers like Kensington and Harlequin. Here are a few very appealing cases in point for those who, like me, love a great page-turner at a great price:

Sometimes it’s a treat to be wrong!

And here’s a promise: tomorrow we’ll let you know about an entire storefront full of novels by a favorite Kindle Nation author, all priced at just 99 cents for a limited time only!