kindle prices

by susanne brindle
14th February 2012

Although I do not yet own a Kindle I am surprised at the low prices authors sell their books for. I've seen plenty of good books, priced around £7 for paperback and only 99p for the Kindle version. I wonder where it is all going. Any views?

Replies

I was wondering about it yesterday!

I hate kindles... will always prefer the physical book. But I can`t let aside the posibility of getting published through it in case of being rejected by agents. Then I began to search about Kindle and I got really surprised with the low prices!

Anyway, I would like to thank Tony Williams and everyone else for making it clearer to me.

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T. O.
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T. O. Bührer
14/02/2012

Lin, don't get me wrong. I completely agree. Any source that encourages reading is always a positive thing (I maintain the Amazon account for my local charity - My wife is the manager of the shop).

I bought all of hardbacks of Harry Potter from charity shops. As well as countless other trilogies,

Ultimately, if it can be passed on it will be whether digitally or otherwise. It's the same with music. It comes with the territory.

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Anthony Scott
Glenn
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Anthony Scott Glenn
14/02/2012

I've been keeping a weather eye on download pricing for ages. Bearing in mind that the million-selling self-pub downloads are priced at less than £1.50 it seems to me if you're unknown and want to sell any sort of numbers you have to price your product at that level.

If you're a well-known Big 6 author you can get away with a lot more, though since the production cost of a download is negligible (compared to a paper book) there are ominous grumblings readers are being taken for a ride to shore up publishers reducing margins.

In the end it's a numbers game. I think if you're a newbie, making peanuts on sales is a necessary evil if you want to get your name known. Personally I don't expect to make any money until I've got 5 or 6 books out there. Maybe not even then, but we live in hope :)

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Jonathan
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Jonathan Hopkins
14/02/2012