Interesting article in various newspapers about John Locke an independent author from Kentucky who has sold a million copies of his ebooks without the aid of a safety-net agent or publisher. One of the interesting ploys he used to garner sales was reducing the price of his books to 99c each. That’s way less than other authors who have signed with traditional publishers. He published through Amazon’s Kindle Direct self-publishing service. Kindle Direct’s pricing structure looks like this:

< $2.99 = royalty of 35% goes to the author.
$2.99+ = royalty of 70% goes to the author.

If my calculations are correct – and they may not be since I am crap at math – he would need to sell six times as many ebooks at 99c for every one copy at $2.99 to make roughly $2 in royalty.

I suppose it all depends what you want: copies sold v. royalties earned. Of course, if you sell at 99c that’s a big incentive to customers to buy your book. In fact, for all I know, most customers browse only the 99c titles looking for a bargain. But is the price six times as attractive as a title at $2.99. I’d be very interested in finding out the answer to that question, because I’ve been mulling over whether to drop the prices of my own books to 99c – as a kind of experiment.

What do you think?