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Publetariat Dispatch: Fiction vs. Nonfiction Ebook Pricing in the Kindle Store

September 27, 2011May 31, 2011 by KND

This week, the folks at Publetariat bring us a post from Joel Friedlander, AKA The Book Designer, on the topic of ebook pricing. Why does fiction generally cost less than nonfiction, and is that okay?

Pricing of e-books is a constant source of discussion online, and we’ve seen the rebellions in the Kindle store when publishers were allowed to start setting their own prices last year.

Some books went up in price, as traditional publishers tried to bring e-book pricing more in line with print book pricing. On the other hand, readers keep looking at the lack of reproduction costs in e-books and often moved to lower-priced alternatives.

Three other factors that seem to be driving the instability of the e-book pricing situation:

The tremendous increase in the volume of sales as the price declines toward $0.99, the lowest price (other than free) in the Kindle store;
The shift of royalty payements, which are 70% for books above $2.99, and 30% for books below that price; and
The ease of changing prices on your Kindle books, combined with the ease of tracking your sales on a daily basis.

To get an idea of where pricing is today, I went over to the Kindle store to have a look around.

Amazon says there are 659,063 nonfiction books in the Kindle store. I took a look at just the top 10 best sellers as of yesterday to see what the pricing looked like. Here’s what I found:

Top 10 Nonfiction Full-Length Kindle e-Books

$6.13 Heaven is for Real by Todd Burpo, Sonja Burpo, Colton Burpo and Lynn Vincent,
$12.99 Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand,
$11.99 The 17 Day Diet by Dr. Mike Moreno,
$9.99 Be a Dividend Millionaire by Paul Rubillo,
$9.99 Allies and Enemiesby Anne Maczulak,
$12.99 The Dukan Diet by Pierre Dukan,
$9.99 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot,
$9.99 Winners Never Cheat by Jon M. Huntsman and Glenn Beck,
$9.99 Leading at a Higher Level by Ken Blanchard,
$9.99 The Gospel of Ruth by Carolyn Custis James,

The average price of these e-books is $10.40. None of these e-books is self-published, by the way.

Then I went to look at the fiction titles, since this is the land of the $.99 bestseller. Here’s the way the top 10 look, pricewise:

Top 10 Fiction Full-Length Kindle e-Books

Amazon reports they have 267,838 fiction e-books in the Kindle store:

$4.17 Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
$7.99 The Lincoln Lawyer: A Novel by Michael Connelly
$9.99 Walking on Broken Glass by Christa Allan
$3.82 A World I Never Made by James Lepore
$9.59 Divine by Karen Kingsbury
$0.99 The Innocent by Vincent Zandri
$0.99 Vegas Moon (A Donovan Creed Novel) by John Locke
$7.99 Shattered: A Daughter’s Regret by Melody Carlson
$4.58 Deadworld by J.N. Duncan
$12.99 The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly

The average price of these books is $6.31.

This means that the average fiction e-book that’s in the top 10 in the Kindle store is retailing for a full 40% less than the average top-10 nonfiction e-book. That’s a huge hunk of change.

Does this mean it’s better to be a nonfiction author, if making money is your aim?

Yes, it does. Self-publishing has traditionally worked best for nonfiction authors with solid information-based books. There is no disputing that a new world of bookselling is upon us, and all the old rules will be scrapped or at least reexamined in the light of new realities.

Are we seeing a rebirth in fiction reading, arising from the easy availability of inexpensive novels? From anecdotal evidence, it seems so, and that is certainly a good thing.

What Price is Right For You?

I think there’s no formula that will help you set your prices. If you’re a novelist, by all means keep track of the experiments of authors like JA Konrath and Zoe Winters and Joanna Penn, you’ll learn a lot.

But this seems to be an area where you have to be willing to experiment to find the right spot for your books. Many novelists have reported selling more and more copies as they gradually lowered their price, to the point that giving up the 70% royalty, when you go below $2.99, just didn’t matter as much as the volume of sales rose. As Konrath says about his title The List, when he lowered the price from $2.99 to $0.99, he sold 20 times as many books.

Here’s what Joanna Penn had to say in her recent article on the e-book pricing situation. Joanna publishes both nonfiction and fiction, so it’s interesting to get her perspective:

I pay far more money for non-fiction books that will help me in a tangible manner than I will for fiction which I read once and then (often) forget. It’s not that I don’t value fiction writing, but the price you pay for entertainment has to be representative vs the price you pay for actionable content.

The answer? Since we are all, in a sense, direct marketers now, we should take a lesson from the direct marketing world: test everything, track the results, adjust your pricing if necessary, and test again. You will become an expert on your own book’s pricing, and this experience will be invaluable as you continue to bring more books to market.

I took this all into account when setting the price of A Self-Publisher’s Companion in the Kindle store at $8.99. Is it the right price? I’m not sure, since the book has been out just a few weeks. Will I experiment with the price? You bet I will, just like all you other direct marketers.

What have your experiences with e-book pricing taught you?

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

Kindle Pricing: Listings Over $9.99 Down 5.3% in the Kindle Store! 4.5% Gain in Titles Under $3! 253,000 Kindle Books Priced Below $3, and They Account for 37% of the Top 100 Kindle Bestsellers, But Big Publishers Still Getting Top Dollar for a Handful of Big Names

July 7, 2019May 20, 2011 by Steve Windwalker

The book business in 2011 is a complicated world, and there’s no single proposition that explains Kindle Store pricing. Big Six publishers and indie authors are going to opposite extremes, and our latest analysis of Kindle pricing shows a tale of two very different pricing strategies.

Screen shot 2011-05-20 at 11.13.36 AM — Click on the pic to have posts like this sent directly to your Kindle with a free trial subscription

At the lower end of the pricing spectrum, the number of Kindle titles priced below $3 has grown by a very substantial 4.5% in the past 10 weeks, led by a doubling of both free contemporary tiles and free public domain titles. There are now over 253,000 books in the Kindle Store that are priced between 0 and $2.99, inclusive, for over a quarter of the overall selection, and these titles — the vast majority of them by indie authors publishing directly on the Kindle platform without traditional intermediaries — hold 37 of the top 100 spots on the Kindle Store paid bestseller list.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Big Six agency model publishers seem to be learning the hard way that most of their offerings will fail to thrive at prices over $9.99. The overall proportion of Kindle books priced at $10 and up continues to fall, with a steep decline of 5.33% between March 7 and May 17. However, at the same time, these same big publishers and their highest selling elite authors may be cheered by the fact that they seem to have gained a countervailing foothold with 35 books priced at $10 or more in the same Top 100 Kindle bestsellers list.

The question that will eventually by answered — perhaps by the number of headstones in the publishers’ cemetery or by the number of authors who jump the publishers’ sinking ships for the world of direct publishing — is how quickly these publishers are losing overall marketshare due to their insistence on what are, for the vast majority of ebooks, unsustainable prices.

Perhaps most importantly, Amazon’s own pricing strategy is very clearly tilted toward offering many quality titles from its own relatively new and expanding group of publishing imprints in the price range from $1.99 to $4.99. Since Amazon knows more about its customers’ behavior on pricing matters than anyone in the world, it is clear that Amazon doesn’t think that the Big Six are hitting the sweet spot when they price books at $12.99 to $14.99.

As Kindle owners who have been known to buy and read vast quantities of ebooks, we pay attention to price. We’re savvy consumers, and when we decide that we want to read something it’s a very natural process for us to look at how its price compares both to the actual prices of other ebooks and to our theories about what we believe prices should be, and to make a purchasing decision accordingly.

So, in order to help keep our readers well informed, every few months here at Kindle Nation we conduct an analysis of Kindle ebook prices and share the results. We look both at the actual prices of all ebooks in the Kindle Store and also at the prices of the ebooks that populate the list of the Top 100 Paid Bestsellers in the Kindle Store. Our most recent survey took place on the evening of Tuesday, May 17, which allowed us to compare Kindle prices that we found in our last survey about 10 weeks ago on March 7.

Beyond the headlines above, here are the questions we always try to answer with these price breakdown posts, and here’s what we found:

Q1. What’s the overall size of the Kindle catalog and how does it compare with that of other ebook retailers?

A1. The overall count of Kindle books has been continued to grow by about 1,000 books a day over the past 10 weeks and currently stands at about 989,000, up from just above 898,000 titles on March 7. Since that figure includes only about 36,300 public domain books, that means there’s no other ebook retailer that comes close to that count for commercially offered ebooks. Barnes and Noble inflates its Nook count with over a million public domain titles, and Apple is rumored to be preparing a TV commercial with a voice-over that says “If you don’t have an iPad, then you don’t have access to the world’s smallest ebook catalog, with fewer than 150,000 commercial titles.”

Q2. How successful has Amazon been in herding prices into its preferred corral between $2.99 and $9.99, inclusive?

A2. The number of titles priced in this range is at 66.01 percent, so that it has actually fallen slightly in the past 10 weeks, from 66.13%. But the percentage of books at $2.99 is up 17% during this period, so in keeping with the headlines above, there’s a somewhat more marked decline in the percentage of titles priced from $3 to $9.99, an entire percentage point (about 10,000 books in raw numbers) from 61.06% to 60.04%.

As a percentage of the overall catalog, titles in the $2.99-$9.99 range are up 3.25% since we checked in December, while there are proportionally 10.2% fewer titles priced under $2.99 and 1.5% fewer titles priced at $10 and up. The growth of titles in the $2.99-$9.99 range has been supported both by the fact that Kindle pays indie authors who conform to this pricing range almost twice the royalty rate that is otherwise available to them and by the frequently stated resistance of many Kindle customers to prices above $9.99. Again, the largest area of growth has been for titles priced at exactly $2.99. After growing from 18,804 to 29,042 between September 5 and December 2, this group expanded to 45,528 in our latest look-in.

Q3. How successful have the big agency model publishers and their Black Knight, anti-reading crusader Steve Jobs, been in raising Kindle Store prices above $10?

A3. The Agency Model, if you’ve come a little late to this party, is a baldly anti-consumer price-fixing conspiracy (I wish I didn’t have to use that word, but sometimes a conspiracy is just that, a conspiracy) that was hatched at the beginning of 2010 by some combination of Steve Jobs and executives of five of the Big Six publishers, with Random House abstaining at first and finally going over to the dark side in February of this year. The stated goal was to mandate retail prices for Kindle books, and all other ebooks under the agency model publishers’ control, at levels that would be 30 to 50 percent higher than the $9.99 price that Amazon had previously set for Kindle Store new releases. The more important obvious but unstated goal was to slow the migration of readers from print books to ebooks. (Retailers had always had the freedom to discount as they saw fit from the publishers’ suggested retail prices in the past, and Amazon had in fact been selling many Kindle titles as loss leaders.) Since the Agency Model went into effect on April Fool’s Day 2010, the percentage of the Kindle Store catalog priced in agency-model heaven at $10 and up has fallen from 21.7% to 19.2% on May 22, 18.8% on June 14, 18.1% on July 18, 16% on September 5, 15.3% on December 2, 15.04% March 7, and 14.3% this week.

How’s that goal of slowing the migration to ebooks working out for publishers? Amazon announced this week that its Kindle ebook sales had tripled over 2010 levels and had surpassed its print sales, despite the fact that Amazon’s own print sales continue to grow. How long will publishers continue to posture as if they have an adversarial relationship with a company that is marching inexorably toward having a 50 percent market share for all books sold in all formats in the United States by the end of 2012?

Q4. Has there been a significant change in the title count for Kindle books priced under $2.99 since Amazon began paying a 70 percent royalty for books in the $2.99 to $9.99 range?

A4. The proportional representation of Kindle books at every price point under $2.99 (free, 99 cents, under 99 cents, and $1.00 to $2.98) fell dramatically from December to March, but in the past 10 months the percentage of titles at these price points as indie authors have discovered that pricing books at these levels can, in many cases, create so much attention that it more than makes up for the far lower royalties.

Q5. Overall, are ebook prices going up or down or staying about the same?

A5. Lower prices are clearly winning, for all the reasons described above.

Q6. Are there changes in the price composition of the Kindle Store’s key bestseller list, the Top 100 Paid Books?

A6. With the launch of the $114 Kindeal (the special offers Kindle) that has recently become Amazon’s #1 bestselling product with, probably, over a million units shipped to date, we’re seeing a bit of the usual post-Christmas phenomenon for the Kindle Store, with a swell of new Kindle owners rushing to fill their Kindles with the books they want. This tends to stimulate sales and downloads at both ends of the pricing spectrum, with bestseller-driven customers buying big name books and savvy consumers snatching up the best deals — and there’s nothing to say that these are not the same customers at both ends of the spectrum. The natural consequence of this surge is that the number of Top 100 bestselling titles in the middle, priced over $3 but under $10, has fallen from 40 to 33 since March 7, while the number of titles in the other categories has risen from 30 each to 32 and 35.

One interesting phenomenon that I couldn’t help but notice is that readers already seem to have gone lukewarm on the Kindle wunderkind of late 2010 and early 2011, former indie author turned newly signed St. Martin’s Press property Amanda Hocking. Just a few months ago she had half a dozen of the top 30 titles in the Kindle Store at prices ranging from 99 cents to $2.99, but Kindle readers seem to be anticipating the likelihood that her forthcoming ebooks will have to be priced in the $9 to $15 range to please the St. Martin’s bean counters. They have kicked Hocking to the curb for John Locke and a group of Top 100 bestselling indie authors who just happen to be Kindle Nation faves and past sponsors, including Julie Ortolon, Scott Nicholson, David Lender, Elisa Lorello, Anna Mara, and Michael Wallace. Hocking’s still holding onto Top 100 status, with two titles in the 80s and 90s.

Q7. Are there any noteworthy trends with respect to free books in the Kindle Store?

A7. Don’t look now, but the number of Kindle freebies are surging. Both public domain titles and free contemporary titles have doubled, and Amazon has finally cracked open the door to allow indie authors to offer their titles free … even if it is not the front door.

Kindle Pricing Analysis: Number of Kindle Bestsellers Priced Below $2.99 Has Tripled Since December, But Publishers Are Also Finding Buyers at Prices Above $10

June 22, 2019March 10, 2011 by Steve Windwalker

By Stephen Windwalker
Editor, Kindle Nation Daily
Posted March 9, 2011

In the last issue of our Kindle Nation weekly digest we noted the existence of some worrisome headlines for Kindle enthusiasts, but we breezily dismissed them with a promise that we would be back this week with some analysis that supports a more hopeful view. Since it has been a little over three months since our last in-depth analysis of Kindle book pricing back on December 3, it’s time for a new price check on Aisle 5, and perhaps in the process we’ll be able to see why we’re a long way from coming to the end of the Kindle Revolution.

Two headlines jump out of the clutter of all the statistics:

Proportionally, the selection of titles priced between $2.99 and $9.99 continues to grow significantly, and the percentage of “outlier” titles above and below that price range has declined dramatically.
However, where bestsellers are concerned the trend is just the opposite. Among the Top 100 paid bestsellers in the Kindle Store, the number priced above $9.99 had grown slightly from 26 to 30 over the last three months, and — much more dramatically — the number of Top 100 paid bestsellers priced below $2.99 tripled from 10 to 30 between December 2 and March 7!

The juxtaposition of these two headlines is fascinating, and suggests the following:

The obvious pricing tug-of-war continues, and Amazon appears to have decided that it can have it both ways by combining popular, quality low-priced offerings by (mostly) indie authors with corporate publishers’ new releases priced mostly in the $9.99-$12.99 range preferred by publishers. My sense is that we hear less and less from Amazon about $9.99 new releases these days, and the company has pivoted so that much of its marketing muscle on pages such as this is devoted to books priced in the $11.99 to $14.99 range.
While this shift in emphasis has been very profitable for Amazon and appears to have been accepted by enough Kindle customers to allow ebooks priced over $9.99 to claim 30% of the rungs on the bestseller list, 30% may not be a high enough share to call this a victory for the agency model. Indeed, another way to look at this is that by insisting on these higher ebook prices (compared with 2008 and 2009), the publishers have wrapped up another 30% of the bestseller list, attached a bow, and given it away to indie authors. 24 of the 30 “cheaper” ebook bestsellers are priced at just 99 cents, and they are pretty much all by indie authors who will earn millions of dollars this year and turn the membership of the Kindle Million Club upside down. The corporate publishers may be enjoying their pie, but it is a significantly smaller slice, and there’s little chance they can get back what they have so blindly given away.

Otherwise, here’s where things stood as of the afternoon of March 7, 2010, and we’ll look at the same questions we always bring to this inquiry:
Q1. What’s the overall size of the Kindle catalog and how does it compare with that of other ebook retailers?

A1. The overall count of Kindle books has been growing by about 1,000 books a day over the last three months and currently stands just above 868,000, up from 769,766 books in December. Since that figure includes only about 15,000 public domain books, that means there’s no other ebook retailer that comes close to that count for commercially offered ebooks. Barnes and Noble inflates its Nook count with over a million public domain titles, and Apple just recently passed the 100,000-title mark in its iBooks store, which is so embarrassingly lame that Apple dropped iBooks from its Apps listings just as it was about to fall out of the Top 20 listings. (By the way, I’m still not convinced that Apple will use pricing, margins, and the totally bogus issue of in-app purchasing to try to freeze the Kindle and other ebook retailing apps off of its iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch platforms.)

Q2. How successful has Amazon been in herding prices into its preferred corral between $2.99 and $9.99, inclusive?

A2. The number of titles priced in this range is at 66.1 percent, the highest it has been at any time in the past year. As a percentage of the overall catalog, titles in the $2.99-$9.99 range are up 3.25% since we checked in December, while there are proportionally 10.2% fewer titles priced under $2.99 and 1.5% fewer titles priced at $10 and up. The growth of titles in the $2.99-$9.99 range has been supported both by the fact that Kindle pays indie authors who conform to this pricing range almost twice the royalty rate that is otherwise available to them and by the frequently stated resistance of many Kindle customers to prices above $9.99. Again, the largest area of growth has been for titles priced at exactly $2.99. After growing from 18,804 to 29,042 between September 5 and December 2, this group expanded to 45,528 in our latest look-in.

Q3. How successful have the big agency model publishers and their Black Knight, Apple anti-reading crusader Steve Jobs, been in raising Kindle Store prices above $10?

A3. The Agency Model, if you’ve come a little late to this party, is a baldly anti-consumer price-fixing conspiracy (I wish I didn’t have to use that word, but sometimes a conspiracy is just that, a conspiracy) that was hatched at the beginning of 2010 by some combination of Steve Jobs and executives of five of the Big Six publishers, with Random House abstaining. The stated goal was to mandate retail prices for Kindle books, and all other ebooks under the agency model publishers’ control, at levels that would be 30 to 50 percent higher than the $9.99 price that Amazon had previously set for Kindle Store new releases. The only slightly less obvious unstated goal was to slow the migration of readers from print books to ebooks. (Retailers had always had the freedom to discount as they saw fit from the publishers’ suggested retail prices in the past, and Amazon had in fact been selling many Kindle titles as loss leaders.) Since the Agency Model went into effect on April Fool’s Day, the percentage of the Kindle Store catalog priced in agency-model heaven at $10 and up has fallen from 21.7% to 19.2% on May 22, 18.8% on June 14, 18.1% on July 18, 16% on September 5, 15.3% on December 2, and 15.04% as of yesterday. Alas, as of last week Random House has joined the rest of the Big Six in the price-fixing game, and just as quickly it has seen serious slippage in the advantage it held previously in the Kindle Store bestseller list: the three previously discounted books in the Stieg Larsson trilogy were #5, #8, and #9 for the month of February but by yesterday had fallen to #9, #15, and #23, and Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone fell all the way from #14 to #32 in its first week under the unforgiving agency-model regimen.

Q4. Has there been a significant change in the title count for Kindle books priced under $2.99 since Amazon began paying a 70 percent royalty for books in the $2.99 to $9.99 range?

A4. The proportional representation of Kindle books at every price point under $2.99 (free, 99 cents, under 99 cents, and $1.00 to $2.98) has fallen dramatically since December.

Q5. Overall, are ebook prices going up or down or staying about the same?

A5. It’s fair to say at this point that ebook pricing is moving in all directions at once. Publishers, authors, readers, and Amazon itself are digging in in various places to defend various pieces of what they see as their turf, and we’ll stay tuned.

Q6. Are there changes in the price composition of the Kindle Store’s key bestseller list, the Top 100 Paid Books?

A6. Since we addressed the Kindle Store bestseller list above, this seems like a good place to mention that ebooks continue to strengthen their hold on the USA Today bestseller list, relative to hardcover and paperback books. As of last week’s list 20 of the top 50 USAT bestsellers were titles for which ebook sales were dominant, compared with 10 for which hardcovers sold the most copies and 20 for which paperback sales led the way. Kindle Store stars held down 7 of the top 150 places on the USAT list, six of those belonging to Amanda Hocking and one to Nancy Johnson. Look for Donovan Creed creator John Locke to crack the USAT list when it is released tomorrow.

Q7. Are there any noteworthy trends with respect to free books in the Kindle Store?

A7. Although there are fewer free books in the Kindle Store than there were in December, it is worth pointing out that the reduction in free books has been among duplicate public domain titles rather than among the free promotional contemporary titles that populate Kindle Nation’s daily Free Book Alert posts.

eBook Leaders Show Random House Sitting Pretty As Amazon’s Kindle Store Discounting Plays Crucial Role in Picking Winners

August 18, 2011February 18, 2011 by Steve Windwalker

By Steve Windwalker

For the past few weeks, we’ve been paying more attention than usual to the USA Today bestseller lists that come out each Thursday because they have provided a fascinating window into the changes that are taking places in what we read and the publishing sources for the books that we are reasing.

Once again, the USA Today top 50 list for the week ended February 13, 2011 shows a healthy representation of titles for which the ebook format is the highest-selling format. There are 19 such titles this week and we provide a full list of those 19 titles below, with their list prices and Kindle Store prices as of today.

For each of the titles listed here, the first price shown is the publisher’s list price as reported by USA Today, and the second, linked price is the Kindle Store price. Wherever the publisher is a participant in the agency-model price-fixing scheme, the two prices will often be the same. For other books, Amazon may discount the book further for Kindle customers at its discretion.

2. Alone Lisa Gardner, Bantam State (F) (E) $0.99 $0.99
3. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Stieg Larsson, Vintage (F) (E) $14.95 $5.00
4. The Girl Who Played With Fire Stieg Larsson, Knopf Doubleday (F) (E) $25.95 $5.00
5. Unbroken Laura Hillenbrand, Random House (NF) (E) $27.00 $9.99
6. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest Stieg Larsson, Knopf (F) (E) $27.95 $9.99
8. A Discovery of Witches Deborah E. Harkness, Viking Adult (F) (E) $14.99 $14.99
9. Water for Elephants Sara Gruen, Algonquin (F) (E) $14.95 $5.00
15. Cutting for Stone: A Novel Abraham Verghese, Knopf A (F) (E) $26.95 $5.00
17. Switched Amanda Hocking, Self-published through CreateSpace (F) (E) $2.99 $0.99
20. I Am Number Four Pittacus Lore, HarperCollins Youth (F) (E) $17.99 $9.99
21. The Confession John Grisham, Doubleday (F) (E) $28.95 $9.99
24. The Help Kathryn Stockett, Putnam (E) $12.99 $12.99
27. Ascend Amanda Hocking, Self-published through CreateSpace (F) (E) $2.99 $2.99
31. Torn Amanda Hocking, Self-published through CreateSpace (F) (E) $2.99 $2.99
34. Room Emma Donoghue, Little, Brown (F) (E) $11.99 $11.99
42. What the Night Knows Dean Koontz, Bantam (F) (E) $28.00 $9.99
44. Dead or Alive Tom Clancy, Grant Blackwood, Putnam (F) (E) $14.99 $12.99
46. Strategic Moves Stuart Woods, Putnam (F) (E) $12.99 $12.99
48. The Perfect Husband Lisa Gardner, Bantam (F) (E) $7.99 $5.00

While we are looking, a couple of other tidbits that caught our attention:

Among traditional publishers, Random House and its imprints are the place to be for authors these days. Random House is the leading traditional publisher in the U.S., and some

may have been nervous for its authors when Random decided to abstain from the agency-model price-fixing scheme and, in the bargain, from the much-hyped Apple iBooks Store. But Random and its imprints and authors have benefited hugely from the price flexibility that Amazon and other retailers have been allowed, especially since the publisher and the authors get paid based on full list price even if a title is discounted below wholesale cost in the Kindle Store and elsewhere. Sixteen of the USA Today Top 50 are published by Random and its imprints, which is a dominant position given other changes in the composition of he bestseller lists. Given that Random has achieved that position without a single sale through the iBooks store, that dominance speaks eloquently of the utter failure of iBooks.

Meanwhile, Amazon and others should take very seriously the king-making role that results from the company’s selective discounting for Kindle titles. It seems very likely that a fabulous book-group natural like Elizabeth Stuckey-French’s novel The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady should be headed straight to the highest rungs of the Kindle Store bestseller list, especially after recent rave reviews in the New York Times, Denver Post, Boston Globe, and Kindle Nation Daily. The book is published by

Random imprint Doubleday, which means that Amazon controls price and discounting in the Kindle Store just as brick-and-mortar booksellers control price and discounting for the hardcover edition. But with Amazon selling the Kindle edition for $13.90, Jeff Bezos and his minions might as well be standing at the gates of bestseller heaven blocking the entrance of one of the more distinctive, independent voices to come along in American fiction in recent years. It says here that as soon as Amazon brings the retail price of Revenge down to the $5-$10 promotional price sweet spot provided for Stieg Larsson, Sara Gruen, John Grisham and others, it will have another bestseller in the making.

Waves of Change in the Kindlesphere: How the Kindle Store is Evolving into Three Stores to Sharpen Competition and Marginalize Outliers

May 13, 2010 by Steve Windwalker

The waves of change continue in the Kindlesphere.

In the next few weeks we expect to see the launch of the Kindle Apps Store, the rollout of new accessibility features including what Amazon calls “audible menuing,” big changes in royalties and publishing features for Kindle authors and publishers, and a completion of the rollout of version of 2.5 of the operating software for the latest generation Kindle and Kindle DX.
Many of us are watching with great interest for the denouement of the negotiations/controversies/conflicts that’s currently keeping new Penguin titles out of the Kindle Store and all Random House titles out of the iBooks Store.
On the hardware side, it remains to be seen whether Amazon will work as hard or place as high a priority on delivering the inevitable Super Kindle with the color touch display as it is working to make what will soon be an installed base of 100 millions iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches super selling venues for Kindle and other digital content, including wolfish Video on Demand offerings donning the sheep’s clothing of the Netflix for iPad app if Amazon pulls the trigger on a Netflix acquisition.

But let’s focus today on dramatic if evolutionary changes that are occurring in the Kindle Store catalog.

Yesterday’s report that Amazon will soon drop free Kindle books from its main Kindle Store bestseller lists is just another portent that, in some ways, the Kindle Store is in the process of being transformed into three stores:

the Kindle bookstore to which we have grown accustomed over the past couple of years, with a large and diverse catalog of over half a million titles priced mostly between $2.99 and $9.99, currently growing at around 25,000 titles a month, and including work of distinction by emerging authors as well as bestsellers by established author;
several thousand other “new release” titles from publishers who have signed onto the agency model price-fixing pact, at least temporarily, with prices set between $10 and $15;
a growing number of free books including Amazon’s current “private label” catalog of public domain titles, a growing number of free promotional titles, and millions of other free public domain titles from third-party sites that Amazon will make increasingly seamless to download and read on the Kindle platform, perhaps with the kind of overhauled, Kindle-compatible “Stanza @ Kindle” offering that might have been behind the departure of Stanza fountainhead Neelan Choksi from Stanza.Amazon.com the other day). .

Now, or beginning at some point between now and June 30, Amazon will be making a major effort to organize the vast majority of Kindle store prices so that they fall in the $2.99 to $9.99 range. As I noted here when Amazon announced this program, Amazon will be using honey rather than vinegar, with an offer to pay direct 70% royalties to all authors and publishers who set prices in this price range through Amazon’s Kindle-compatible Digital Text Platform and participate fully in other Kindle features like text-to-speech.

There will be other outliers, including declining percentages of the total catalog that is priced between $.01 and $2.98 or over $14.99. The contraction of offerings in these price ranges, of course, will be driven by the promise of direct 70% royalties. For titles currently earning the standard Kindle DTP royalty of 35% at sales-suppressing prices from $15 to $19.99, (or, for that matter, $10 to $14.99), bringing the suggested retail list price down to $9.99 and taking any other steps necessary to comply with the new 70% royalty program ought to be a no-brainer for any author or publisher capable of doing the math. As a cursory check of the Kindle Store’s current bestselling titles in that $15-to-$20 price range reveals, there are precious few titles that are cracking the top 2,500 at such prices, and many would experience significantly higher sales at the $9.99 price range.

In a post the other day about bargain prices for a couple of Elizabeth Peters ebooks in the Kindle Store, I made the point that readers may actually be able to influence publisher pricing behavior when we jump on bargain prices like those mentioned in the post, even while the Kindle bestseller list shows some signs that Kindle owners are accepting agency-model pricing:

When an agency model publisher fixes a low price for a backlist title like these, the publishing is putting itself in a position to learn a great deal about pricing, sales, and profitability in the ebook world. Based on my own experiences and those of other authors, I believe that the ideal Kindle Store price for many backlist titles is in the $2.99 to $4.99 range, and that most such titles, if they are quality books with a little bit of marketing effort behind them are likely to sell roughly twice as many copies if they are reduced from $9.99 to $4.99 or roughly three times as many if they are reduced from $9.99 to $2.99. If Hachette and other publishers find out that such formulas apply to their backlist titles, it could be a powerful incentive for them to lower prices wherever possible.

So, the fun continues. When there’s competition between business behemoths like Amazon and Apple, it tends to be complicated by all kinds of counterforces, not the least of which are the many ways in which the two companies are partners. But as nice a guy as Jeff Bezos may be, he is also, to his great credit, the leader of a company that is as ruthlessly committed to fostering competition within the Kindle Store as it is to competing with other businesses in the ebook sector. The result for customers in the Kindle Store as elsewhere in AmazonWorld is like to be ever greater selection and, over the long haul, ever better pricing.

Are Agency Model Publishers Hanging Together or Playing for Their Own Edges? Latest Kindle Nation Price Survey Shows Decline in Titles Priced Over $9.99!

May 7, 2010 by Steve Windwalker

By Stephen Windwalker, Editor of Kindle Nation Daily

It’s been exactly a month since we last took a systematic look at the population of ebook price points in the Kindle Store, so it seems a good time for a fresh look after five weeks of experience with the agency model. under the agency model, we were told, some of the big publishers were colluding with Apple to take retail ebook pricing out of the hands of retailers such as the Kindle Store and replace Amazon’s standard of $9.99 as a price for newly released ebooks with a 30% to 50% increase to price points between $12.99 and $14.99.

The remarkable news is that very little has changed when it comes to Kindle Store ebook prices, and if anything in the past 30 days the trends are toward lower prices. Alas, publishers! How can you make collusive price fixing work if some of you are playing for an edge and hoping that your ~~partners~~, er, competitors will maintain their unpopular high prices?

After a brief period in late March and early April when we saw slight increases in the percentage of books prices over $9.99, there have been small but significant decreases at the same levels since April 7. Among the 511,259 ebook listings in the Kindle Store as of 9 a.m. today, May 7, 2010, the total percentage of books prices above $9.99 has decreased from 22.69% to 21.73%, essentially a full percentage point.

Meanwhile, while the percentage of titles priced at exactly $9.99 has decreased slightly from 11.01% to 10.62% during the past months, listings at all price points from 99 cents up to $9.98 have increased.

Other recent trends:

The overall size of the Kindle Store catalog has continued to increase by about 800 titles a day, growing from about 487,000 on April 7 to over 511,00 this morning.
The increase of over 63,000 in the number of Kindle Store titles since February 25 is roughly equivalent to the total number of listings in Apple’s iBooks Store at launch.
The number of free titles in the Kindle Store declined from 4.2% to 4.0% during the past month, while the number of free titles in the iBooks Store is reportedly somewhere between one-third and one-half of all iBooks titles.

Among the 100 top Kindle Store “bestsellers,” it’s a case of plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

As of this morning, 59 of these titles were free, 2 were between $.01 and $3, 15 between $3 and $9.98, 16 at $9.99, and 8 at $10 and up.
As of April 7, 61 of the 100 top Kindle Store “bestsellers” were free, 1 was between $.01 and $3, 16 between $3 and $9.98, 12 at $9.99, and 9 at $10 and up.

It will be interesting to see how the pricing array evolves over the next two months, as Amazon prepares to increase its royalty structure to 70%, by June 30, for thousands of independent authors and smaller publishers who participate fully in Kindle features and maintain or bring their suggested Kindle Store retail prices into Amazon’s preferred range between $2.99 and $9.99, inclusive.

Here’s a price breakdown of the 511,759 book titles in the Kindle Store as of 9 a.m. EDT on May 7, 2010:

Here’s where we stood with the 487,715 book titles in the Kindle Store as of 9 a.m. EDT on April 7, 2010:

20,620 Kindle Books Priced “Free” (4.23%)
4,709 Titles Priced from a Penny to 98 Cents (0.97%)
46,360 Kindle Books Priced at 99 Cents (9.51%)
69,846 Kindle Books Priced from $1 to $2.99 (14.32%)
94,891 Kindle Books Priced from $3 to $4.99 (19.46%)

86,924 Titles Priced from $5 to $9.98 (17.82%)
53,705 Titles Priced at $9.99 (11.01%)
7,537 Titles Priced from $10 to $12.99 (1.51%)
13,124 Titles Priced from $13 to $14.99 (2.69%)
90,011 Titles Priced at $15 and Up (18.46%)

Here’s where we stood with the 480,238 book titles in the Kindle Store on April 1:

20,620 Kindle Books Priced “Free” (4.29%)
4,706 Titles Priced from a Penny to 98 Cents (0.98%)
43,993 Kindle Books Priced at 99 Cents (9.16%)
68,807 Kindle Books Priced from $1 to $2.99 (14.33%)
93,706 Kindle Books Priced from $3 to $4.99 (19.51%)

85,612 Titles Priced from $5 to $9.98 (17.83%)
53,124 Titles Priced at $9.99 (11.06%)
5,952 Titles Priced from $10 to $12.99 (1.24%)
14,158 Titles Priced from $13 to $14.99 (2.95%)
89,525 Titles Priced at $15 and Up (18.64%)

Here’s where we stood with about 463,000 Kindle Store titles on March 10:

20,125 Kindle Books Priced “Free” (4.34%)
2,588 Titles Priced from a Penny to 98 Cents (0.56%)
39,095 Kindle Books Priced at 99 Cents (8.44%)
64,105 Kindle Books Priced from $1 to $2.99 (13.84%)
90,580 Kindle Books Priced from $3 to $4.99 (19.55%)

84,055 Titles Priced from $5 to $9.98 (18.15%)
53,697 Titles Priced at $9.99 (11.56%)
5,793 Titles Priced from $10 to $12.99 (1.25%)
13,731 Titles Priced from $13 to $14.99 (2.96%)
89,448 Titles Priced at $15 and Up (19.31%)

And here’s where we stood with about 447,000 Kindle Store titles on February 25:

19,795 Kindle Books Priced “Free” (4.42%)
3,023 Titles Priced from a Penny to 98 Cents (0.67%)
36,370 Kindle Books Priced at 99 Cents (8.12%)
62,275 Kindle Books Priced from $1 to $2.99 (13.9%)
87,722 Kindle Books Priced from $3 to $4.99 (19.58%)
81,230 Titles Priced from $5 to $9.98 (18.13%)
55,269 Titles Priced at $9.99 (12.34%)
5,139 Titles Priced from $10 to $12.99 (1.15%)
9,331 Titles Priced from $13 to $14.99 (2.08%)
87,771 Titles Priced at $15 and Up (19.59%)

Around the Kindlesphere, April 29, 2010: Non-Freebie Bestsellers, Faith-Based Freebies, Prices at the Time of Paperback Release, Brisk Online Sales, Kindle Rising in the Land of the Rising Sun?

April 29, 2010 by Steve Windwalker

By Stephen Windwalker, Editor of Kindle Nation Daily

© Kindle Nation Daily 2010

Not for nothing, but from Publisher’s Marketplace via The Independent, here are the top ten bestselling non-freebie books in the Kindle Store for the week ended April 27, 2010:

1. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson (2=position last week)
2. Caught – Harlan Coben (1)
3. The Girl Who Played With Fire – Stieg Larsson (3)
4. House Rules – Jodi Picoult (4)
5. Deception – Jonathan Kellerman (9)
6. The Help – Kathryn Stockett (6)
7. Every Last One – Anna Quindlen (new)
8. Deliver Us From Evil – (re-entry) David Baldacci
9. Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand – Helen Simonson (8)
10. The Shadow of Your Smile – Mary Higgins Clark (7)

Meanwhile, it’s time to clean out the top drawer of my desk here in the corner office at Kindle Nation headquarters….

Speaking of freebies and non-freebies, I’ve noted here a few times my anecdotal sense that religious publishers seem to have a passkey to the portals through which ebooks are offered free in the Kindle Store, but I have resisted drawing any harsh conclusions since I had not taken the time to assemble any real evidence. So I appreciate the rigor that Bufo Calvin has brought to a post at his I Love My Kindle blog, “Onward Christian Freebies.” Calvin drilled down on the breakdown of the 59 free promotional books in the Kindle Store a few days ago. “When I analyzed the books I came up with 41 from known faith-based publishers, 18 from other publishers,” he wrote. So, not to draw conclusions, but what’s up with that, Amazon? I mean, I’ve downloaded and occasionally even reviewed (positively) books from faith-based publishers before, and I have nothing in the world against them. I am fully prepared to grant the possibility that there may not be a level playing field when it comes to salvation, but I — and many other citizens of Kindle Nation — have called in the past for parity in the feature and pricing offerings available to publishers large and small, and it’s about time Amazon put this in place. Any publisher that agrees to play generally within Amazon’s preferred Kindle Store pricing framework of $2.99 to $9.99 ought to have equal access to a “dashboard” option of offering certain titles, up to a set percentage of that publisher’s titles, at a zero-price promotion for a limited and specified period of time. Treat us all the same, Amazon, and perhaps we’ll all get to the Promised Land together!
And speaking of Kindle Store bestsellers, I noticed today that Pat Conroy’s novel South of Broad, one of the top non-freebies in the Kindle Store during the late Summer and Fall of 2009, is climbing the Kindle sales-rank ladder again as public awareness is stimulated due to the marketing of its paperback edition, which will be released next Tuesday, May 4. Years ago Herman Raucher’s film adaptation of The Great Santini (with Duvall and Danner) drove me to buy and read the book. I’ve been a multimedia Conroy consumer ever since, and in August I purchased both the Kindle and Audible.com versions of South of Broad. I won’t be buying the paperback next week, even at Amazon’s discounted price, but I do find it interesting to note that, by abstaining from other publishers’ collusive agency price-fixing model and allowing Amazon to put its unparalleled multi-format pricing experience to work on behalf of all, Conroy’s publisher (the Nan A. Talese imprint falls under Doubleday’s umbrella, and thus under Random House) is maximizing brisk online sales in four important formats. The hardcover is currently ranked #1,896 in Amazon’s main bookstore with its price discounted from $29.95 to $19.77, pre-orders of the paperback are at #760 with a price discounted from $16 to $10.88, the $9.99 Kindle Edition moved from about #500 to about #400 in the past 24 hours, and the unabridged Kindle-compatible Audible.com version is, I’m sure, still selling a few copies with a price discounted from $31.50 to $23.63. For Mr. Conroy, life is pretty good, and all the better because he’s not published by MacMillan, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, or Penguin/Pearson, the five agency model price fixers.
Speaking of brisk online sales, someone bought a Kindle yesterday after visiting Kindle Nation Daily and clicking on a link to Amazon. This has happened five times this month, and since Amazon sends $25.90 to Kindle Nation Daily two or three months after each such occurrence (yep, that was a disclosure), it looks like I will be in good shape to pay the various monthly fees associated with Kindle Nation Daily in July. So, thank you! And it appears that my sales are just the tip of the iceberg for Amazon, since I see that as of this morning the Kindle is still Amazon’s #1 selling electronics item, and Amazon said in a release earlier this week that in fact the Kindle remains the #1 selling item, period, for Amazon. Other products worth noting among Amazon’s top 25 in Electronics as of this morning are the Kindle DX at #7, iPod Touch models at #2, #3, and #19, other iPods at #14 and #15, and an Apple mouse at #24. Among Amazon’s top 25 in laptops are iPad models (offered by third-party sellers at premium prices) at #1, #2, and #4, and these models also rank #12, #23, and #74 among Amazon’s top 100 in computers, where Apple is additionally represented by 8 Mac models in the top 40.
Finally, I’m sure that folks who understand the 21st century innovation of “cloud computing” far better than I would be quick to tell me that it would be a huge stretch to link this news release from Amazon yesterday to global Kindle expansion, but I’m not so sure. Amazon’s headline reads: Amazon Web Services Launches Asia Pacific Region for Its Cloud Computing Platform; Cloud pioneer now offers its suite of web services from new Singapore datacenters to serve customers desiring an Asia Pacific presence, and you can click on the title to read the entire release. After all, don’t clouds often bring rain? Perhaps I am out of my depth here, but Bloomberg Business Week did have an intriguing story last week about talks between Amazon and Kodansha ahead of a possible in-country Japanese language Kindle launch, and I’m paying close attention to all the tidbits I can find about Amazon actually allowing the Kindle to establish country-by-country international roots for three reasons: (1) the number of Kindle Nation readers beyond U.S. borders continues to grow dramatically; (2) it’s potential news; and ( 3) I have a small vested interest, in that my Asian publisher (Nikkei BP) is releasing its Japanese translation of my book The Complete User’s Guide To the Amazing Amazon Kindle in paperback in May and wants to follow up with a Kindle edition as soon as Amazon offers a Japanese-language Kindle platform.

A boy can dream, whether he’s Ash on a Pokemon quest in Japan or an author in Arlington on a quest for first-mover status in the Japanese Kindlesphere.

Why should I provide my email address?

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