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Andy Marx is an award-winning writer and photographer, whose work has appeared in Variety, The Los Angeles Times and Entertainment Weekly, among others. In addition, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the popular comedy website, Hollywood & Swine (www.hollywoodandswine.com), which is known throughout the world for its lampooning of the entertainment industry. His paternal grandfather was the legendary comedian, Groucho Marx, and his maternal grandfather, the renowned songwriter, Gus Kahn.Royalties
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Always check the price before you buy! This post is dated July 18, 2014. The titles mentioned may remain free only until midnight PST tonight.
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The Eden Plague: Free: A Futuristic Thriller, Book 0 (Plague Wars Series)
by David VanDyke
When special operations veteran DJ Markis finds armed invaders in his home and it all goes sideways, he turns to his brothers in arms to fight back. On the run from the shadowy Company, soon he finds himself in a war for possession of a genetic engineering secret that threatens the stability of the world. But who is behind it all – and are they even human?
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Alphas Unleashed: A J. S. Scott Romance Sampler
by J. S. Scott
This collection contains Mine For Tonight, The Curve Ball, and Riding With The Cop
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TURN A BLIND EYE (A Florida Murder Mystery)
by Marta Tandori
Eight years ago, Michigan retirees, Jack and Beverly Donnelly, had helped Libby Newton recover from an unspeakable tragedy. Now the tables are turned and it’s the old couple who need Libby’s help when the most recent consequences of Beverly’s progressing dementia have left the old couple homeless. Libby, now the general manager of Banyan Bay Resorts, one of Orlando’s premier timesharing properties, secretly stashes the old couple in a new luxury unit intended for the resort’s VIP guests until she can find them a new home.
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Found By You (Destiny Bay Romances-The Islanders 2)
by Helen Conrad
Lonely Malia Carrington fell for Brad when they were teenagers. He left Hawaii without knowing she was carrying his son. Seventeen years later, he’s back, and she’s determined not to let him turn her life upside down a second time. If he finds out the truth, she knows he will take her son away with him–along with her heart.
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Cage The Dead
by Gary F. Vanucci
As Gaia arrived to work that fateful day to a zoo full of visitors, including students from a nearby school, strange events began to unfold. After hearing rumors of a deadly virus being released and then news of a terrifying broadcast, she begins to witness both zoo employees and patrons dying and coming back from the dead as flesh-eating zombies. Will Gaia be able to survive the chaotic environment created by both the wild predators and the living dead?
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Worth The Weight (The Worth Series Book 1: A Copper Country Romance)
by Mara Jacobs
Lizzie Hampton is literally a shadow of her former self. Having lost half her body weight, she’s headed to her small hometown to test out her new body on an old flame. Just a harmless fling to get her self confidence back before she returns to the city and the new man in her life.
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Breathless (Jesse Book 1)
by Eve Carter
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Free eBooks & Apps! Plus The Best Kindle Deals on Earth – Today’s Spotlight Bargain eBook: Andy Marx’s Royalties ($4.99)
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Andy Marx is an award-winning writer and photographer, whose work has appeared in Variety, The Los Angeles Times and Entertainment Weekly, among others. In addition, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the popular comedy website, Hollywood & Swine (www.hollywoodandswine.com), which is known throughout the world for its lampooning of the entertainment industry. His paternal grandfather was the legendary comedian, Groucho Marx, and his maternal grandfather, the renowned songwriter, Gus Kahn.Royalties
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Always check the price before you buy! This post is dated July 17, 2014. The titles mentioned may remain free only until midnight PST tonight.
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Check out our Free Book Search Tool for a boatload of free books
or check here for the best deals today on Kindle!
Treating Murder: Book One of the Veronica Lane, M.D. series (medical thriller)
by Gabrielle Black
Everyone has secrets. Some kill for them… Brilliant and beautiful Veronica Lane, M.D. finds herself the subject of a murder investigation after her patient is found poisoned in the hospital. When the only witness to the murder turns up dead and the police arrest her, Dr. Lane is forced to try to solve the case herself. With her reputation, her freedom, and possibly her life on the line, Dr. Lane hunts down the killer. Her only help: an underage hooker, a local reporter, and her handsome attorney.
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Devoured (The Hunger)
by Jason Brant
Life isn’t kind to Lance York. A full-time job has eluded him for years, his wife loathes the sight of him, his bank accounts are empty, and his wealthy father-in-law revels in his failures. After he lunges in front of a car to save a sick and disoriented woman, Lance awakens in a quarantined hospital. A devastating plague is spreading worldwide, driving those infected with it insane. Their bodies begin to mutate into horrors that have haunted mankind’s nightmares for centuries.
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BookGorilla: Free eBooks, Bestsellers, and Bargain eBooks for Kindle Readers
Imagine a single daily alert, tailored to your personal reading preferences, featuring the best deals on the best Kindle ebooks. Sweet. But you don’t have to imagine. As you’ll see, we’re talking Grisham and Grafton, King and Kingsolver, Roberts and Rowling, Dan Brown and Sandra Brown, and other top-shelf bestselling authors too numerous to name. Then we sprinkle in 5-star freebies, dazzling boxed set alerts, indie discoveries, and must-read nonfiction — all absolutely free!
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Beyond the Clearing
by Robin Mahle
In memory of a dear friend who had been taken too soon, they decide to honor a wish that was left unfulfilled. The Serenity resort, carved into the stunning red rock mountains would be the place to celebrate the life of their beloved Diane. And to allow reflection on their own lives, Maggie, Rachel and Susan thought this would be the perfect getaway.
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Smoked (An Alex Harris Mystery Book 5)
by Elaine Macko
When the vegan wife of a local butcher shows up dead, the police think the husband is the most likely suspect. But the dead woman’s daughter is certain her father did nothing wrong and hires Alex Harris to find the real killer.
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Heroes of Steel RPG
Command your party of four heroes as they strive to protect the last remnants of humanity. Born into a time of warring gods and dark powers, your four unlikely heroes embark on a grim journey set in the sprawling and immense post-apocalyptic medieval world of Steel.
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
by Mark Twain
Dripping with Mark Twain’s iconic wit and wisdom, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer chronicles young Tom and his best friend Huckleberry Finn on a life-changing journey of mischief, intrigue, and excitement.
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Waves of Change in the Kindlesphere: How the Kindle Store is Evolving into Three Stores to Sharpen Competition and Marginalize Outliers
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
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.
Related posts:
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Amazon Announces New 70% Royalty Option for Kindle Authors
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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?”
From the Kindle Nation Mailbag: About Amazon’s Wholesale and/Or Royalty Payments to Authors and Publishers
Generally I think of Kindle Nation citizens as being reasonably well-informed about what is going on in the world of ebooks, and all the more so when they are also authors. So I was a little taken aback when I received this email today from Kindle Nation citizen and author Tom:
Steve,
This article is interesting. The best thing for us small fry authors would be if Amazon would relent on their 65% take of sales and fall in line with the reported 30% take that Apple plans. Do you know if Amazon has any plans to reduce its commission?Thanks,Tom
Well, not to put to fine a point on this, Tom, but someone hasn’t been paying attention!
Actually, I think it is pretty easy to lose the thread of what’s been going on, especially when the mainstream news media often seems to display the attention span of an heavily caffeinated third-grader in its coverage of these issues.
Actually, Amazon announced back on January 20, before there was any public coverage or attention paid to the Apple’s royalty plans, that it would soon begin paying a direct 70 percent royalty to “us small fry authors.” The story and its implications for authors, publishers, and readers was covered in detail in these two Kindle Nation Daily posts from January 20:
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Amazon Announces New 70% Royalty Option for Kindle Authors
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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?”
And here are a few more recent posts on this business, for those who want to follow along at home:
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About eBook Prices and Author Royalties: Price Elasticity and the Demand for Books
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The Ebook Revolution and the Indie Publishing Revolution: Readers and Writers Locking Arms with Comrade Bezos
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Amazon Builds Kindle Revolution with Guerilla Tactics vs. Conventional Warfare by Publishers and Competitors
About eBook Prices and Author Royalties: Price Elasticity and the Demand for Books
Chris B, a reader from the Dallas area, got right to the heart of one of the challenges of thinking about the effects of the ebook pricing controversy on authors in this comment left yesterday on my post The Math of Publishing a Book in Print or Electronic Format:
When you put the “author royalties” of the 9.99 version as 2.50, realize that few authors ever make more than a few thousand dollars on a book. A $3 difference in sale price is not going to decide whether a book hits the NYT bestseller list (and makes some real money), but it might make a difference in feeding the author’s kids for another month.
I don’t want to see Kindle books go up in price, but we have to be realistic about it. We’ve always known Amazon was selling books at an artificially low price to do that.
Believe me, I do not want any authors’ kids, including my own, to miss their three squares a day. In fact, I think it’s important to save some authors from themselves here. While Motoko Rich’s New York Times piece and my post drill down on the pricing and costs of an individual book as they might play out for a hardcover print run of 15,000 copies, it’s impossible to think intelligently about the effects of these economics on an author without serious contemplation of the number of copies sold.
So, fair warning:
The economic law of demand states basically that “if the price of a product increases, the quantity demanded decreases, while if price of the product decreases, its quantity demanded increases.” This price elasticity of demand is most pronounced when it is accompanied by three conditions:
- the product represents a discretionary purchase rather than a necessity;
- the product is one out of many choices available to consumers to meet a particular interest or want; and
- the product is available to consumers without much marketplace friction, i.e., it can be purchased without significant outlay of travel, shipping, time, or other accompanying expenditure.
With millions of titles available in multiple formats, it is obvious that books meet these conditions about as well as any type of product, for most consumers. And all marketplace friction vanishes completely once a consumer has access to ebooks either through ownership of a Kindle or competitor’s ebook reader or by being able to run a Kindle App on a PC, BlackBerry, iPhone, iPod Touch, or other device.
The result is that readers pay close attention to what they have to pay for books. Many wait for paperback availability of their favorite authors’ titles rather than pay a premium for the opportunity to read those books in hardcover a few months earlier. For those trade paperback copies, the author’s royalty is usually little more than a dollar per copy, far less than half of the average hardcover royalty of $3.90 referenced in the Motoko Rich piece. So that’s one form of price elasticity of demand.
Another kind of price elasticity of demand comes into play where ebook prices are concerned.
The recent Winter 2010 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey showed evidence that Kindle owners have become more price-conscious as a result of the recent ebook pricing controversy and are very resistant to paying more than $9.99 for an ebook: 75 percent of the 1,892 respondents identified with the statement that “I’ll pay over $9.99, but only rarely when I simply must have an ebook.”
As of this morning there are 102,160 titles priced at $10 and up in the U.S. Kindle Store, or about 22 percent of the overall total of 451,317 ebooks in the store. None of those $10-and-up titles are currently ranked among the top 40 Kindle bestsellers, and only four are ranked between 41 and 100. 13 of the top 100 are priced at $9.99.
So, if an author’s royalty is $2.50 for a Kindle book priced at $9.99, and $3.25 for a Kindle book priced at $12.99, let’s do the math. If the book sells 30 percent more copies when priced at $9.99 than it sells when priced at $12.99, the author’s royalties are at break-even and her readership — people might buy her other books — is significantly larger. Indeed, from what I have seen, the sales differential is probably more like 50 to 100 percent, and some of the most successful Kindle authors are making far more than the “few thousand dollars” referenced in Chris’ comment by pricing their books below $9.99.
Of course, the same percentages and competitive-pricing benefits that are available to authors ought to apply to publishers, were it not for the likelihood — evident from the industry sources quoted in Rich’s article and in numerous comments by publishing insiders throughout the recent ebook pricing controversy — that publishers are trying to reverse the Kindle Revolution. As publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin told Rich: “The simplest way to slow down e-books is not to make them too cheap.”
If that’s the case, it also seems likely that an increasing number of those midlist authors — those of us who have to pay close attention to “feeding [our] kids for another month” — will be forced to consider another offer that Amazon has put on the table for us: the possibility of receiving direct royalties of 70% by going “around” the publisher and dealing directly with the Kindle platform for ebooks priced between $2.99 and $9.99.
Around the Kindlesphere, February 25, 2010: iPad Killers and Kindle Apps
- It’s 9 a.m. in Arlington, 6 a.m. in Cupertino, and still no Apple Store pre-order page for the Apple iPad despite rumors that the new tablet would be available for pre-order today. While we keep watch for you there, you can go to Amazon for a Protective Carrying Case, or to M-Edge to scope out a colorful choice of protective covers soon to be released for the iPad.
- If you’re among those who are questioning whether you want to lay out the $1,500-$2,500 that it will cost to keep a 3G iPad up and running over three or four years, the time may be coming when the iPad’s availability drives down prices for Apple’s iPod Touch. My partner in a Committed
relationship loves the Kindle for iPod Touch app: she just finished reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest on her Touch (we bought the bestseller in the Kindle Store for $9.99), and brought the iPod to her book group last night so she could check her bookmarks during the conversation. Best place to keep track of the best prices for the various iPod Touch models? Amazon’s iPod Store
Speaking of Apple, two little snippets that caught my eye from the 24/7WallStreet blog:
- Remember those bygone days when every new gadget that came along the pike was dubbed the next Kindle Killer? Alas, they are no more. 24/7 had a post last night on the latest upgrade of the Nintendo DS, called the DSi XL, which goes on sale March 28 (March 5 in the UK) with “what Nintendo calls its 100 Classic Books application which ‘transforms the Nintendo DS family of products into a library of timeless literature when it launches on June 14 at a suggested retail price of $19.99, highlighted by 100 works from authors such as William Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Jane Austen, Mark Twain and more. Readers can adjust the size of text, place bookmarks and even download new content via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service.’ The article bills the ebook reader as the DSi XL’s “most important feature,” and the headline? “Nintendo’s Little iPad Killer.” But that doesn’t mean for a minute that Amazon shouldn’t focus some effort on outfitting the gadget with a Kindle App, just as I suggested the other day it should do for the Fisher-Price iXL Learning System.
- On another front, in scanning a 24/7 post about Apple passing the 10 billion downloads mark in the iTunes Store, I noticed this line: “‘We make 9.1 cents off a song sale and that means a whole lot of pennies have to add up before it becomes a bunch of money,’ said Rick Carnes, president of the Songwriters’ Guild of America in comments reported by CNET.” Interesting, in light of the number of authors and publishers who seem to be backing Apple’s horse in the ebook pricing controversies. Scribes who think they can climb on Apple’s bandwagon and they’ll soon have Amazon exactly where they want it might want to think again about just what they’re wishing for. Before Apple even announced the iPad, Amazon announced it would soon begin paying 70% royalties directly to authors who opt in to direct Kindle publication in the $2.99 to $9.99 price range through Amazon’s Digital Text Platform.