# A Pricing Experiment (re: the Victorine Method)



## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

_UPDATED TO FILL IN THE LAST COUPLE OF MONTHS._

I'm going to post the results of a pricing experiment on this thread and let the other writers here study me as a guinea pig. I just went into KDP and changed the price of my book, The Righteous, from 2.99 to .99 and plan to leave it there for at least two months. The book has done fairly well for a new release, hovering in the 6,000 - 10,000 ranking, although it has slipped from that in the last 24 hours. Readers have liked it so far, giving it 28 reviews, of which 19 are five star reviews, 6 are four star reviews, and 3 are three star reviews. I am releasing the sequel, Mighty and Strong, this Friday, at $2.99, and will be doing some limited announcements on this and other boards.

If the .99 pricing model works, it should work with this book. It is a suspense/thriller, which is a strong category, has a good cover, an endorsement on the page from multiple NY Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner, and a grabby first chapter. I should also see strong sales for the sequel, which I believe is an equally strong book and also has a grabby opening. If the book sells, and is good, that is the next thing they will pick up. I'll also be keeping an eye on sales for my other books.

As of 2/16/11, the book is ranked 12,845. Amazon has not yet changed the price. Here are sales for the last few days. They averaged exactly 10 per day at the 70% royalty rate. I need to sell roughly 60 a day at the lower price to equal the money, but I would consider it a success if I sold a lower number but this boosted sales of the other books, particularly the sequel. I plan to add to this initial post, bolding the date the price changed and we'll see how it goes.

2/07/11 - 15
2/08/11 - 3
2/09/11 - 23
2/10/11 - 10
2/11/11 - 4
2/12/11 - 6
2/13/11 - 8
2/14/11 - 11
2/15/11 - 4
*Price Change:*
2/16/11 - 22 (8 before change 14 after)
2/17/11 - 33
2/18/11 - 39
2/19/11 - 182
2/20/11 - 108
2/21/11 - 43
2/22/11 - 50
2/23/11 - 116
2/24/11 - 134
2/25/11 - 211
2/26/11 - 124
2/27/11 - 153
2/28/11 - 151
3/1/11 - 103
3/2/11 - 132
3/3/11 - 130
3/4/11 - 157
3/5/11 - 144
3/6/11 - 154
3/7/11 - 131
3/8/11 - 131
3/9/11 - 194
- 205
- 174

I'm cutting the dates, but you can see the progression continue: 179, 170, 153, 175, 175, 186, 184, 291, 257, 232, 216, 239, 186, 221, 252, 294, 281, 242,
262, 315

April: 228, 317, 318, 304, 352, 304, 328, 296, 339, 380, 372, 392, 399, 374, 469, 729, 586, 457, 502, 503, 466, 466, 420, 394, 367, 410, 1067, 1037, 699, 926


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## MrPLD (Sep 23, 2010)

Yep, we've dropped ours to $0.99 as well... pushing it hard where I can but hopefully it's not "too late" before the tsunami of other 99c books crashes over the eBook world


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## Nathan Lowell (Dec 11, 2010)

Getting on a genre sublist is key. I think if you can push that 12k sales rank down to 4 or 5 you'll probably get onto one of them. In sci-fi the threshold is around 6k.

This will be interesting to watch.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Nathan Lowell said:


> Getting on a genre sublist is key. I think if you can push that 12k sales rank down to 4 or 5 you'll probably get onto one of them. In sci-fi the threshold is around 6k.
> 
> This will be interesting to watch.


My newly released book, Implant, was in the 2,000s yesterday. It has a collaborating author and all our family and friends and fans were picking up their copies. It didn't hit any sub-lists. When I did a giveaway on Devil's Deep a few weeks back, it climbed as high as the 500s for a day or two before slowly sinking and that was the only time I saw it on a sub-list. I think for thrillers, you need to be in the top 1,000 to show up.


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## Jennybeanses (Jan 27, 2011)

I dropped The Goblin Market down to $.99 on Friday and saw an increase in sales over the weekend, so I decided to keep it there for awhile and see if I can reach entice more readers with the lower price. So far, I've increased from 1-2 sales a day to 3-5. It'll be interesting to see if it continues to progress over the next few weeks. 

Good luck, Michael.


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## MSTHRILLER (Jan 20, 2011)

The Victorine Method?  A new indie term is born. Before you know it, we will have all kinds of new terms - like, 
"Hey, I did a Konrath." Meaning someone went from traditional to indie publishing.  

Good luck. It will be interesting to see what happens.


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## jimbronyaur (Feb 9, 2011)

Thanks for sharing the idea AND results here... it will interesting to see.  I have some material coming out soon and one of the biggest things I'm working on is trying to figure out the "right" price.


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## JRainey (Feb 1, 2011)

I dropped These Hellish Happenings down to $0.99 yesterday and have already seen an increase in sales (even though I started a giveaway yesterday, too ). I'll keep there, see what happens. I'd love to hear other authors' experiences with this.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

MSTHRILLER said:


> The Victorine Method?  A new indie term is born. Before you know it, we will have all kinds of new terms - like,
> "Hey, I did a Konrath." Meaning someone went from traditional to indie publishing.
> 
> Good luck. It will be interesting to see what happens.


I figure it's better than the Michael Wallace Approach. That's the one where I had an editor who wanted my book, then dropped out to fight cancer, an editor who bought my first professional story, then promptly retired, a friend whose career had been an unmitigated success until he collaborated on a book with me, then found himself orphaned and unable to place his next book, a big name agent who suffered her first failed auction while trying to sell two of my books for big money, and several other near catastrophes.

The MWA is quite effective at dealing critical damage to any agent/editor/publisher/writer who tries to help my books see print.


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## MSTHRILLER (Jan 20, 2011)

I know a lot of people who have done to Michael Wallace approach and it was no fun. 

Are you sure that two months is enough time to see if the Victorine Method will work?


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Good luck! I dropped the price of one of mine last weekend and there has been a slight uptick in sales. I don't have any plans at this point to raise it back up.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

MSTHRILLER said:


> I know a lot of people who have done to Michael Wallace approach and it was no fun.


The only good thing is that I now have several high quality, vetted manuscripts ready to go online. Reviews have been coming in strong enough that it gives me confidence that these books would have done just fine through a traditional publisher over the last several years. But yes, I have been doubting, worrying, stressing, etc., for years.



> Are you sure that two months is enough time to see if the Victorine Method will work?


No, but it should be enough time to see if the Victorine Method is _starting _to work. If my sales nudge up slightly, week to week, month to month, then I'll count it a success. If I'm still selling 5-15 copies per day after two months, it will be pretty clear that it isn't working. The other key thing is to compare sales to the other books. If sales at the end of two months are within the same range of the other books, +- 50%, regardless of what that number may be, then the .99 price probably doesn't make much of a difference either way.

I should say that it's obvious that the Victorine Method works in some cases. Clearly, it worked for Victorine E. Lieske. The correlation between her price and sales leaves no room to doubt. But there's no way to duplicate her combination of timing, cover, price, writing skill, and whatever lucky algorithm nudged her sales forward at just the right time. With the most important factor always being the writing that she brings to the table, which is unique.


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## Joseph Rhea (Nov 9, 2009)

I've had "sales" several times during the past year where I dropped my book down to $0.99 for a limited period (usually a few weeks to a month.) A year ago it had a more dramatic effect (in March I got into the top 300!) because so few authors were willing to sell for such a low price. Now it is much more common to see full-length novels like mine selling for $0.99, so the effect is less pronounced (in my experience). For example, I am running another 99-cent sale this month and my sales are about 3 times higher than before, but I'm making 1/4 as much in royalties per week. I'm only doing it to help me break 3,000 total sales (I like round numbers ) but then I will go back to my "list" price of $5.99 and stay there for awhile. I would love it if the "Victorine Model" worked for me (keep it at 99cents and sell thousands of copies per month), but maybe it is genre-specific (in that her target audience wants to pay that price and nothing more). Hasn't worked for my genre (high tech science fiction) where there seems to be fewer buyers and they distrust "cheap books." For me, the best income comes from selling at $5.99 or above--go figure...


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## Will Write for Gruel (Oct 16, 2010)

Does Amazon do something to promote a book that drops in price? I wonder if it gets a book some immediate attention to undergo a price drop?


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

I notice that people who have had luck with the 99 cent method (shall we give it something even more colorful -- Vicki's Golden Ticket?) tend to have luck right away.  

The other thing I noticed is that, as with Vicki herself, they had some buzz built up - which is hard to tell, but Michael has sufficient reviews and regular sales to make it seem ready to me.

Camille


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Asher MacDonald said:


> Does Amazon do something to promote a book that drops in price? I wonder if it gets a book some immediate attention to undergo a price drop?


Not that I've noticed -- not by itself. It might factor in with other things to get it a boost in the algorithm, however. (Also, if the right people find out about the price change, you can get a little surge of visits/sales which boosts you in the internal algorithms.)

Camille


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

daringnovelist said:


> The other thing I noticed is that, as with Vicki herself, they had some buzz built up - which is hard to tell, but Michael has sufficient reviews and regular sales to make it seem ready to me.


I hope that's true, and my reviews have been solid, but I'm still searching for my normal selling rate, based on how much sales have been seesawing up and down day to day, so it's hard to say for sure. The big key for me will be how many of the people buy that .99 book and actually read it, rather than just scooping it up because it's a book for a buck. And then they have to actually like it (which I feel more confident about), and do so enough to go check out the regularly priced sequel.

BTW, is there a bigger bargain than a full-length, high quality book for 2.99 or less? Is there any other form of entertainment that is cheaper on a $/hour basis? The closest I can think would be $1 movie rentals.


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## Will Write for Gruel (Oct 16, 2010)

MichaelWallace said:


> I hope that's true, and my reviews have been solid, but I'm still searching for my normal selling rate, based on how much sales have been seesawing up and down day to day, so it's hard to say for sure. The big key for me will be how many of the people buy that .99 book and actually read it, rather than just scooping it up because it's a book for a buck. And then they have to actually like it (which I feel more confident about), and do so enough to go check out the regularly priced sequel.
> 
> BTW, is there a bigger bargain than a full-length, high quality book for 2.99 or less? Is there any other form of entertainment that is cheaper on a $/hour basis? The closest I can think would be $1 movie rentals.


If your into gaming you can play a game like World of Warcraft for $15/month. There are players who easily put in 100 hours a month.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Asher MacDonald said:


> If your into gaming you can play a game like World of Warcraft for $15/month. There are players who easily put in 100 hours a month.


True, that's a good point. My kids put in about 50 hours between them. And you can buy a video game with a one-time cost and free play.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

So the price change is finally live as of five minutes ago. I don't know why it took so long to propagate through, since nothing else changed. You'd think price changes would be instantaneous. In any event, I'd sold 8 copies from this morning at $2.99, so I'll watch from here. My sequel, Mighty and Strong, is semi-live (still "publishing," and with no cover and I'd announced to questioning fans that it wasn't releasing until Friday), and has five sales already, so some of the readers of The Righteous must have been anxiously awaiting the next segment.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Day one had mixed results. I sold 8 copies before the change went live this afternoon, then had 14 sales, plus two refunds of the earlier sales at 2.99 that I believe were then repurchased at the lower price. Overall sales were a significant bump over the previous few days, but they might have been juiced somewhat by another factor. I've been getting ready for my release on Friday of the sequel and quietly uploaded the second book so it would be ready when the cover came in. Someone noticed this and linked it on the Amazon kindle board and some people started discussing it. I sold 20 copies of the sequel today and ended up throwing up a placeholder cover for the time being.

And one other annoying development. I made no other change except a modification to the price, but somehow, Amazon has messed up the format, or I uploaded an earlier version of the document at some point, so I have a funky version online at the present and am unable to fix it until the status changes over from "publishing," where it has been all day.

My books are currently ranked:

The Righteous: 3,152 (up from about 7,500 when the price change went live this afternoon)
Mighty and Strong: 5,347 (unranked earlier, as the first sales happened today)
The Devil's Deep: 6,197 (up from about 8,500)
Implant: 7,810 (down from ~5,500, but this was just released a few days ago and the release push is fading, plus I have no reviews yet)
State of Siege: 37,892 (up a bit, but this book is only selling 1-2 copies a day, and that didn't change today)


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## MrPLD (Sep 23, 2010)

1 week in on my 99c run... 7 books sold... damn, I'm sure I'm missing a few zeros there.  My own fault anyhow as my 2 month absence from promoting means that there's basically nothing out there exposing the 99c sale aspect.

Paul.


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## Staceywb (Jun 27, 2010)

Thanks for doing this experiment and posting the results.  I've been thinking about lowering Glimpse to .99 when I get ready to publish the last book in the trilogy in June.  Glimpse has been doing well at $2.99, but I'm interested in seeing what lowering the price will do for the other two books in the trilogy.  Your experiment will be really helpful to me.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Staceywb said:


> Thanks for doing this experiment and posting the results. I've been thinking about lowering Glimpse to .99 when I get ready to publish the last book in the trilogy in June. Glimpse has been doing well at $2.99, but I'm interested in seeing what lowering the price will do for the other two books in the trilogy. Your experiment will be really helpful to me.


No problem, that's why I'm doing it. Victorine and others have been great about sharing results and I thought I could help as well by providing more data.

It looks like Glimpse is in the mid-2000s, which is what? 25+ sales a day? That's a tidy little sum of money over the course of a month or two and I can see why you'd be reluctant to mess with that formula.


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## Kevis Hendrickson (Feb 28, 2009)

Joseph Rhea said:


> I've had "sales" several times during the past year where I dropped my book down to $0.99 for a limited period (usually a few weeks to a month.) A year ago it had a more dramatic effect (in March I got into the top 300!) because so few authors were willing to sell for such a low price. Now it is much more common to see full-length novels like mine selling for $0.99, so the effect is less pronounced (in my experience). For example, I am running another 99-cent sale this month and my sales are about 3 times higher than before, but I'm making 1/4 as much in royalties per week. I'm only doing it to help me break 3,000 total sales (I like round numbers ) but then I will go back to my "list" price of $5.99 and stay there for awhile. I would love it if the "Victorine Model" worked for me (keep it at 99cents and sell thousands of copies per month), but maybe it is genre-specific (in that her target audience wants to pay that price and nothing more). Hasn't worked for my genre (high tech science fiction) where there seems to be fewer buyers and they distrust "cheap books." For me, the best income comes from selling at $5.99 or above--go figure...


I have to agree that the 99 cent sales model works better in some genres than others. When the Kindle was first released to the market, I lowered my book's price to 99 cents to try to compete with the handful of authors who were selling their Kindle books for 1 penny. In those days, it was a rare sight to find an indie book priced that low. Needless to say, we were selling books almost faster than DTP could track them. But once it became the trend for new authors to sell their books for 99 cents, the impact of selling book's for less than a dollar was lost. Having a book priced low does increase sales. But I think the readers of certain genres are almost entirely opposed to paying more than a couple of bucks for an indie book. If my guess is right, those are the same genres that tend to purchase the largest number of low priced books. In my experience, SF is not one of those genres.


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## hs (Feb 15, 2011)

Thanks for sharing the data from your pricing experiment.
Based on the very small sample size that you listed, I found it curious that your highest sales came today and exactly one week ago.  Have you found a pattern that your sales are higher on Wednesdays, or am I just noticing sample bias?


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## Tina Folsom (Sep 22, 2010)

Okay, I'm also doing a pricing experiment.

I dropped Amaury's Hellion tonight from $4.99 to $2.99. At $4.99 I was selling an average 47 copies a day with a sales ranking of 1,090. This is my "worst" selling in the Scanguards Vampires series (despite the fact that in my opinion it's better than the 1st book in the series - but what do I know? I'm just the writer!). There are a total of 3 books in the series so far with the fourth being released in April.

Let's see what it does over the next month or two - and also whether this will affect my sales in the other two books in the series. I'll be reporting back.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Tina Folsom said:


> Okay, I'm also doing a pricing experiment.
> 
> I dropped Amaury's Hellion tonight from $4.99 to $2.99. At $4.99 I was selling an average 47 copies a day with a sales ranking of 1,090. This is my "worst" selling in the Scanguards Vampires series (despite the fact that in my opinion it's better than the 1st book in the series - but what do I know? I'm just the writer!). There are a total of 3 books in the series so far with the fourth being released in April.
> 
> Let's see what it does over the next month or two - and also whether this will affect my sales in the other two books in the series. I'll be reporting back.


You must be doing very well to have 6 books at $5.99, all around the top 1,000 or better. Congratulations.


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## Tina Folsom (Sep 22, 2010)

MichaelWallace said:


> You must be doing very well to have 6 books at $5.99, all around the top 1,000 or better. Congratulations.


Thanks, Michael, I'm indeed very fortunate. --- BTW, the books are at $4.99 actually. I try to keep under $5 because I feel that's sort of a magical mark, and I want to be definitely cheaper than my peers in the genre (Sherrilyn Kenyon, Kerrelyn Sparks, Kresley Cole, JR Ward), who sell at around $7.99.

But I'm happy to drop my price if that means I can make it up in enough sales for my revenue to stay at least the same as now.


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## Staceywb (Jun 27, 2010)

MichaelWallace said:


> No problem, that's why I'm doing it. Victorine and others have been great about sharing results and I thought I could help as well by providing more data.
> 
> It looks like Glimpse is in the mid-2000s, which is what? 25+ sales a day? That's a tidy little sum of money over the course of a month or two and I can see why you'd be reluctant to mess with that formula.


Yeah, I'm selling about 1,500 a month overall, with Glimpse and Day of Sacrifice selling the best. When I look at other authors doing well in my genre (YA paranormal romance) many of them have the first book in a series priced at .99 and then subsequent books priced at $2.99-$3.99, so I'm wondering if that will work for me too. I'm hesitant to change up the formula until I have another $2.99 book available because I've gotten used to making around the same amount of money each month. I don't know why I'm being such a big chicken about it.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Staceywb said:


> Yeah, I'm selling about 1,500 a month overall, with Glimpse and Day of Sacrifice selling the best. When I look at other authors doing well in my genre (YA paranormal romance) many of them have the first book in a series priced at .99 and then subsequent books priced at $2.99-$3.99, so I'm wondering if that will work for me too. I'm hesitant to change up the formula until I have another $2.99 book available because I've gotten used to making around the same amount of money each month. I don't know why I'm being such a big chicken about it.


Oh, I can understand. When you lower the price, you really have to leave it there for at least a couple of months to see what happens. If you sell 25 books at 2.99 apiece, two months works out to $3,000 in royalties. If you lower the price to .99 and double those sales to 50/day, you'll earn about $1,000 in royalties. That $2,000 loss is a big chunk of money to spend trying to fix something that's not broken at the moment.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

hs said:


> Thanks for sharing the data from your pricing experiment.
> Based on the very small sample size that you listed, I found it curious that your highest sales came today and exactly one week ago. Have you found a pattern that your sales are higher on Wednesdays, or am I just noticing sample bias?


Not necessarily sample bias, but the book hasn't been out that long and that first Wednesday was the aftermath of a giveaway I did when the book first came out. There was a slowly fading boost of actual purchases that came after the giveaway bumped my rankings.

In case anyone is interested, I've been holding in the low 2000s throughout the day, but it's hard to sort out yet the .99 price change from the boost I'm getting from putting the sequel online. About 30 people have purchased the sequel already and were talking about it on the Amazon forum, which I'm sure enticed a couple of new people to pick up the book.


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## David Derrico (Nov 18, 2009)

Thanks for sharing the figures, everyone. Kevis, I think you may be right about science fiction not being a genre where 99 cents works very well as a pricing strategy. Obviously it worked for Vicki in her genre, and it worked big time, and was very noticeable right away. However, when I've recently had a 2-week 99 cent sale, I barely registered any change at all in my sales -- not even double, let alone the 6x it would take to break even.

I think it varies by genre, by number of books the author has, whether the books are in a series, luck, etc., etc.

In my experience, we all obsess over doing all we can to increase sales: marketing, cover, description, price, reviews, tags, genre bestseller lists, etc. But I've seen my sales fluctuate by factors of 10 one way or the other when I've made no changes to books or covers or marketing efforts. I've seen cutting the price by 2/3rds not affecting sales at all. I've seen my website / blog hits triple while sales get cut in a third. So my conclusion is that the majority of factors that influence our sales are out of our control: Amazon's internal algorithms, search engine ranking, "people who bought this also bought," word of mouth, and pure luck.

I mean, were my books somehow better when they were selling 1,500 copies a month than they are now (selling 150-250)? Do some books peak and others stay steady and others take off and never slow down? Do certain genres get hot and others cool off? Did Amazon removing my books for a week due to an Amazon glitch ruin my momentum? Did readers hate the books and stop spreading the word? Did Amazon change their search algorithms? Did I benefit from a lucky "people who also bought" placement for a while? There's just no way of knowing. I know that won't stop us from pulling our hair out trying to figure it out, though.


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## Victorine (Apr 23, 2010)

Wow, a method named after me?  I'm so flattered!  

Michael, a few things I did, in no particular order:

1. I put my price in my signature line here at KB.  I do think that helped people click over to the book that might not have normally.

2. I announced the price change on the Amazon forums.  (You have to be careful there, but I did it meekly... "I hope this is okay to post" kind of thing.)

3. I posted fairly regularly over on the Amazon forums for that first two weeks, always with a link to my book after my name, and the 99 cent price too.

4. I posted once a week to the Facebook Amazon Kindle fan page, letting people know about the 99 cent price.

5. I was careful not to say how long I would keep the 99 cent price.  I knew I would want to keep it if it made more money in the end, and I didn't want to have a deadline to change it back.

That's all I can think of right now.  I'll post more tips if I think of anything else I did.

Vicki


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Victorine said:


> Wow, a method named after me? I'm so flattered!
> 
> Michael, a few things I did, in no particular order:
> 
> ...


Thank you, Vicki, you're helpful and gracious, as always.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

21:00 EST is when I check my sales for the last time for the day, so I can do my update now. As you can see, I sold 33 copies of The Righteous today. It is hard to say, but I think some of these are due to the release of the sequel, Mighty and Strong. There was a thread someone started about it on the Amazon boards and I think a few people bought copies of The Righteous as a result. I did some limited mentioning of the sale price online.

In any event, sales tripled today over my previous nine day average and it sold slightly more than the rest of my books put together, some of which had very unimpressive sales today and others of which did okay. My oldest book, with sixty reviews after only a month, did about average, 10 copies. Financially, it was a loss of about 50% of revenue for The Righteous, but as it was only the first full day, I took the jump in sales as a good sign. I'm also hoping for some synergy with the sequel, Mighty and Strong, so if all those cheap copies of The Righteous bump sales 50% or more for Mighty and Strong, I'll consider that a very good thing.

Oh, and The Righteous is currently at 1,903 in the Kindle store, which is not bad at all. It's still ranked too low to show up on any of the bestseller lists for its category. I think I need to get in the top 1,000 overall for it to show up, as the thriller category is crowded.


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## Tina Folsom (Sep 22, 2010)

Reporting back after the first 48 hours of Amaury's Hellion at the reduced price of $2.99 (instead of $4.99):

Sales are about 10% higher than the last two days, and I still have about 4 hours of the day left, so at this rate, sales will be about 15-20% higher than yesterday. 

My sales rank 48 hours ago was 1,090. 

It is now:
# Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #862 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
    * #8 in Books > Romance > Gothic
    * #22 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Romance > Fantasy, Futuristic & Ghost
    * #22 in Books > Romance > Fantasy & Futuristic


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Day 3 of my pricing experiment. I sold 39 copies of The Righteous, which includes 1 in the UK store. I should probably look into improving on my total UK sales of 2 for all my books, but it's all I can do to keep writing, doing my other work responsibilities and promote the books Stateside. That number is up from 33 yesterday.

My other books sold a total of 18 books, which is a pretty weak day. Implant and State of Siege sold an unimpressive 1 copy each and Devil's Deep, with all the fantastic reviews, had lackluster sales of 6, with the remaining 10 being for the sequel to The Righteous, Mighty and Strong. This is the book I'm really hoping will earn me money for the hit I'm taking on the lower Righteous price. But even taking the reasonable assumption that The Righteous would sell ~10 copies per day at this point, my loss today would have only been $6.

All in all, I'm happy so far. If sales of the book keep nudging higher, I'll be feeling great in another couple of weeks. I'd say sales in the 30s probably have a neutral effect, and anything less would be a disappointment. I hope my other books have a stronger day tomorrow.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

What a day this was. I was humming along at the ~35 per day pace of the last two days when I lay down to read/nap for awhile. When I checked in again an hour and a half later, I'd gone from 23 sales to 55. I watched, incredulous, as I kept selling. I had no idea what was going on, if I'd just reached a magical tipping point, if I'd received a review somewhere, or maybe I'd just benefited from some obscure Amazon algorithm. Half Orc then pointed me to this post from The Kindle Review:

http://ireaderreview.com/2011/02/19/7-saturay-afternoon-deals-for-your-kindle/

The Righteous by Michael Wallace. Price: $1. Genre: Thriller, Murder in a Polygamist Enclave, Mystery. Rated 4.5 stars on 29 reviews. When a reader writes this you have to take notice - This mystery was very realistic to the point that I had dreams that I was in Blister Creek, Utah.

That was apparently it, and I kept selling at a nice clip all day. The Righteous has climbed all the way to 295 in the overall store, although the climb has almost stopped at this point. I'm also in the 70s in the overall thriller category. Tough list to crack, apparently, if you need over 150 sales per day to hit it.

Anyway, it looks like sales have slowed a bit over the last hour, and I expect to drop back down. It would be great if I could nudge that 35ish sales figure to 50ish when the dust settles, and I'll be hoping to convert some of those sales to purchases of Mighty and Strong in a couple of weeks.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Well done, Michael. I took a big leap while I was napping, too. Maybe napping is the key.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> Well done, Michael. I took a big leap while I was napping, too. Maybe napping is the key.


I saw that. Weren't you a KND sponsor today? Your ranking shot through the roof.

Here's hoping we stay at those lofty rankings as long as possible and that we enjoy many more naps.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

MichaelWallace said:


> I saw that. Weren't you a KND sponsor today? Your ranking shot through the roof.
> 
> Here's hoping we stay at those lofty rankings as long as possible and that we enjoy many more naps.


Yes, KND does it for me again. Since I had a 99 cent book this time, I've sold about 30% more than the $2.99 book so far. There's still the overnight West Coast sales to come. Last time, sales continued for several days after. Here's my current ranking.

#1,541 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

* #67 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Historical Fiction
* #68 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Romance > Historical Romance
* #69 in Books > Romance > Historical

I think I'll take a half an hour *nap *so I can stay up for rankings watch.


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## kcmay (Jul 14, 2010)

I had a Daily Cheap Reads feature on Thursday for which I lowered the price to 99c. It took my ranking from 13,000-something to 1098 at the lowest. It started creeping back up today, so I kept an eye on it and set a point at which I determined that it was no longer cost effective to keep the 99c price.

For the first couple weeks of the month the book's price was $3.99, but I was only selling an average of 3 per day. Then I lowered the price to $2.99, and from then until I set it to 99c, it had 5.5 sales per day average. I figured that I'd need to sell 30 per day at 99c to earn the same money. I hit only 23 today, and the ranking kept sliding down and down and down, so the ranking + 99c price were no longer working for me.

I'm going to leave it at $2.99 for a while and gather more data.


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## Victorine (Apr 23, 2010)

Good job, everyone!  

Vicki


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## rsullivan9597 (Nov 18, 2009)

The post at Kindle Review - while good for your sales will put a wrinkle in your experiment. Results would be much different without this little "kick in the pants". But I'm glad you are seeing a big jump and a wider audience.

My $0.99 experiment resulted in $9,000 a month loss. But with a book at $4.95 I have to sell 10x books to break even and the chances of going from several thousands a month to tens of thousands a month on a single book is not very likely. If you want to see the analysis of my numbers you can find it here.


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## CJArcher (Jan 22, 2011)

Thanks for posting your results everyone.  While not officially doing an experiment, I've priced my first book at $1.99 (down from $2.99 because it wasn't moving) and my other two books at 99 cents.  So far The Mercenary's Price at 99 cents is way outselling Sky Pirate at $1.99 and has been up a week less.  Honor Bound has only been up a few days but is doing Ok.  So my numbers aren't huge but so far the 99 cents is working for me. I think I need to keep my books at this low price point to establish a name, and my guess is romance readers love the cheaper books as they generally read a lot. I want to keep Sky Pirate at the higher price for now as it's the one I've been promo-ing and the steampunk theme is supposedly hot.  We'll see.


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## Tina Folsom (Sep 22, 2010)

Not sure my drop to $2.99 for Amaury's Hellion is working. Over night the sales rank dropped again, now it's worse than before the price drop:

# Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,163 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

    * #11 in Books > Romance > Gothic
    * #29 in Books > Romance > Vampires
    * #35 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Romance > Fantasy, Futuristic & Ghost


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## HelenSmith (Mar 17, 2010)

Thanks for sharing all this information - good luck with your price experiments, everyone.

I have also started a little 99 cents experiment. I noticed that people were having a lot of success at the 99 price point so I wrote a piece of short fiction (17,000 words or about 70 printed pages, not quite novella-length) called Three Sisters, the first story in a cozy mystery series. It's available exclusively in the Kindle store and it's 99 cents at Amazon.com and 71p over at Amazon.co.uk.

I plan to write several short, fun episodes a year and make them available to readers at the cheapest possible price.

So far Three Sisters is getting good reviews and selling more copies than my novels, which are priced at between $3.99 and $4.99.

It definitely helps to have review and listings sites that are willing to feature reasonably priced kindle books and I'm very grateful to all the sites that have mentioned Three Sisters since it launched two weeks ago.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

My 99 cent book (Listen To Your Heart) ended up selling about 40% more than my 2.99 book (Ariana's Pride) in a 24 hour period (approx). I have no plans right now to raise the price of ltyh back to $2.99.

I was never really happy with pricing ltyh at $2.99. It's a full-length novel so I did. However, it's 68K words while AP is 111K and C&C is 168K. My novelettes are 30-35K and I charge 99 cents for them. By this rationale, ltyh should be $1.99, but for some reason, I find that price awkward.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

My book is currently listed #1 on the Amazon list of movers and shakers. I don't know how long it will last, but this is the first time I've ever been #1 on any list, anywhere, except for maybe those kinds of lists you try to avoid.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/movers-and-shakers/digital-text/ref=pd_ms_pg_1?ie=UTF8&pg=1


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

MichaelWallace said:


> My book is currently listed #1 on the Amazon list of movers and shakers. I don't know how long it will last, but this is the first time I've ever been #1 on any list, anywhere, except for maybe those kinds of lists you try to avoid.
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/gp/movers-and-shakers/digital-text/ref=pd_ms_pg_1?ie=UTF8&pg=1


Congratulations. A good book at the right price is a winning combination.


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## CJArcher (Jan 22, 2011)

MichaelWallace said:


> My book is currently listed #1 on the Amazon list of movers and shakers. I don't know how long it will last, but this is the first time I've ever been #1 on any list, anywhere, except for maybe those kinds of lists you try to avoid.
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/gp/movers-and-shakers/digital-text/ref=pd_ms_pg_1?ie=UTF8&pg=1


Congratulations, Michael. There's some big hitters in that list.


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## AnnetteL (Jul 14, 2010)

Fascinating thread. I'm still stuck on the "Victorine Method." I can totally see that term catching on!


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Any hopes that my boost would be permanent have faded this afternoon. As of this evening, it looks like I'm back to selling 2-3 books per hour, which is not bad, but if I had to guess, I'd expect to sell about 60 copies of The Righteous in the next 24 hours and around 40 the next day as the last echos of that great blog review fade. My optimistic scenario is that it sticks at 40+ sales.

My other books have continued in their modest way, selling 14 copies. I need to find a way to get those numbers up a little. In particular, sales of the sequel to The Righteous, Mighty and Strong, were disappointing, the weakest they've been since it was released five days ago. If the $0.99 price is going to work, it has to lure people to book #2.


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## Patrick Skelton (Jan 7, 2011)

Somebody mentioned that Sci-fi doesn't do well at 99 cents. I can attest to that.  My novel, The Device, has been on the market for three weeks now.  I had it at 4.99 for the first week and was selling about 10 downloads a day.  Then I dropped it to 99 cents and I only averaged about 12 downloads a day for a week. I put it up to 2.99 and have averaged 20 downloads a day for the last week. That seems be the sweet spot for some reason.  I hate to generalize, but I think readers of speculative fiction are bit more choosy than readers of romance/mystery fiction.  99 cents in the science fiction genre screams cheesy.


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## Victorine (Apr 23, 2010)

Patrick Skelton said:


> Somebody mentioned that Sci-fi doesn't do well at 99 cents. I can attest to that. My novel, The Device, has been on the market for three weeks now. I had it at 4.99 for the first week and was selling about 10 downloads a day. Then I dropped it to 99 cents and I only averaged about 12 downloads a day for a week. I put it up to 2.99 and have averaged 20 downloads a day for the last week. That seems be the sweet spot for some reason. I hate to generalize, but I think readers of speculative fiction are bit more choosy than readers of romance/mystery fiction. 99 cents in the science fiction genre screams cheesy.


Yes, I do believe that some genres do better at a higher price. I'm keen to guess that the free books and the 99 cent books boost each other up, and I hardly ever see a Sci-Fi that's free. That's more of my guess than people think saving money is cheesy. 

Vicki


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## Patrick Skelton (Jan 7, 2011)

Point taken, Vicki.


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## Gordon Ryan (Aug 20, 2010)

MichaelWallace said:


> Any hopes that my boost would be permanent have faded this afternoon.


Michael, from what I can see, you're still at #438 on overall Amazon sales. That's not a slump in my book. Perhaps the update will continue to raise that number, but you're still far ahead of the game. I posted your link on one of the Amazon threads today (other than the thread about your book)

All in all, you've done remarkably well. And as to your writing skill, well, "Thou sayest."

Gordon Ryan


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## Tina Folsom (Sep 22, 2010)

Not sure my price drop to $2.99 for Amaury's Hellion is working. It's selling way less copies than the other two books in the series which are priced at $4.99. Could it be that readers might think it's no good because it's cheaper?

Its sales ranking has dropped by 200 points.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Tina Folsom said:


> Not sure my price drop to $2.99 for Amaury's Hellion is working. It's selling way less copies than the other two books in the series which are priced at $4.99. Could it be that readers might think it's no good because it's cheaper?
> 
> Its sales ranking has dropped by 200 points.


Or they might think it's a novella or promotional work.

Here is something I wonder about, and it might work for you. Are you selling through Smashwords too? If so, once the lower price has propagated to other booksellers (especially Sony) you can raise the price back up on Amazon, and after a day or two Amazon will show it as a discounted book -- i.e. the list price will be the higher price, and the "sale" price will be lower. That may give readers a signal that it is a full book of the same value as the others, just discounted. (However, Amazon only shows these discounts on the actual book page. In a list of your books, it will just have a lower price -- so it might not work.)

Camille


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## Victorine (Apr 23, 2010)

Tina Folsom said:


> Not sure my price drop to $2.99 for Amaury's Hellion is working. It's selling way less copies than the other two books in the series which are priced at $4.99. Could it be that readers might think it's no good because it's cheaper?
> 
> Its sales ranking has dropped by 200 points.


If a price change causes your rank to get worse and less sales, I would change it back to what was working.

Who knows why people do what they do. 

Vicki


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Gordon Ryan said:


> Michael, from what I can see, you're still at #438 on overall Amazon sales. That's not a slump in my book. Perhaps the update will continue to raise that number, but you're still far ahead of the game. I posted your link on one of the Amazon threads today (other than the thread about your book)


I'd love to be at 438 long term, but I saw the sales per hour slip yesterday afternoon and sure enough, I'm down to 650 this morning. Anything in the top 1,000 would be great, but at this point, the momentum is in the wrong direction. We'll see where I end up in another 48 hours.



> All in all, you've done remarkably well. And as to your writing skill, well, "Thou sayest."


Whenever someone says this in The Righteous or Mighty and Strong, you know it's time to start edging toward the door. 

But thank you very much for the compliment. A compliment from a fellow writer is the best kind there is.


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## Alexis-Shore (Feb 20, 2011)

This is an interesting read, thanks Michael.

I want to drop my price now, but I updated my tags yesterday and I can't until it's "published" again.

Has anyone tried what Lee Goldberg did with his high selling novel and its meagre selling sequel? Combine them into an omnibus? Might also be an idea for all the trilogies; an omnibus of all three for cheaper than buying them separately.


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## MrPLD (Sep 23, 2010)

Sales are still profoundly weak here - but I've had time to revamp the WWW site, so hopefully that'll make people feel a bit better about buying the book too.  I've also hard to start reorganising more reviews / blog-visits etc.  I think the BIG missing piece in my work is all the reviews/blogs.

Paul.


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## CathyQuinn (Dec 9, 2010)

This is fascinating, thanks for sharing!


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Michael, how are your UK sales doing at the 99 cent price? They're pretty new to kindling and are still looking for bargains.


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## SheriLeigh (Feb 21, 2011)

I dropped both mine to $0.99 - as someone pointed out at Konrath's blog, if you're not selling anything, what's to lose?


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> Michael, how are your UK sales doing at the 99 cent price? They're pretty new to kindling and are still looking for bargains.


Very weak. I'm not sure what to do to boost my sales over there. I wish the Amazon reviews for the same book would show up on both sites, as that would definitely help.


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## MrPLD (Sep 23, 2010)

MichaelWallace said:


> I wish the Amazon reviews for the same book would show up on both sites, as that would definitely help.


It really is annoying isn't it  Not sure what the deal is with them not sharing their book databases.


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## RachelHowzell (Nov 4, 2010)

Victorine said:


> Wow, a method named after me? I'm so flattered!
> 
> Michael, a few things I did, in no particular order:
> 
> ...


Vicki, you are a pearl. First, you inspired me to drop the price of _The View from Here_. And then! _Then! _You mentioned the Facebook Amazon Kindle page that I knew nothing about. Since posting on the FB page less than ten minutes ago, I've sold twelve copies. Thank you for sharing your experience.

Rachel


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

MichaelWallace said:


> Very weak. I'm not sure what to do to boost my sales over there. I wish the Amazon reviews for the same book would show up on both sites, as that would definitely help.


I've been on two UK forums since just before they started getting their Kindles. Back then, you had to purchase something in order to post on Amazon UK. Now you can post without purchasing but you still can't review or tag.

Sales are slower than US, of course, but fairly regular. For the first few months, I was ranked between 1 and 3 quite often in Romance/Short Stories. Not so much anymore. Before KND, my UK sales were about 1/3 of my US sales.

I copied all the reviews I had done for other authors to Amazon UK and a few have done the same for me.


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## MrPLD (Sep 23, 2010)

RachelHowzell said:


> Since posting on the FB page less than ten minutes ago, I've sold twelve copies. Thank you for sharing your experience.


Off-topic a bit but I wanted to compliment you on your cover-art, very nice.


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## RachelHowzell (Nov 4, 2010)

MrPLD said:


> Off-topic a bit but I wanted to compliment you on your cover-art, very nice.


Thank you so much, MrPLD. I'm blessed to have a husband whose an art director... And your covers are just as moody.

R.


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## Tina Folsom (Sep 22, 2010)

Camille & Vicki,

yeah, not sure why people do what they do. It almost feels like they think because it's cheaper than the other two in the series, it's not as good? The other two in the series are still selling more than this one despite the higher price. So, I'm dropping the cheap route. Not working for me.

And by the way, since I'm doing a short promotion over at B&N to offer my book A Touch of Greek for $1.99 for a limited time, Amazon has just picked up that price change and dropped the price of that book. And you're right, Camille, the discount only shows up on the detail page. On the search page, you will just see that it's $1.99 ie. a cheap book. Only the detail page tells you its list price is higher.


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## RachelHowzell (Nov 4, 2010)

Okay, so my pricing experiment is SUCCESSFUL. This is The View from Here's rating right now:

#518 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

    * #86 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery & Thrillers > Thrillers > Suspense
    * #95 in Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Thrillers > Suspense

This is my first time with a rating so high (or low). And I'm thrilled. Again, thanks Vickie!

R.


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

Victorine said:


> Wow, a method named after me? I'm so flattered!
> 
> Michael, a few things I did, in no particular order:
> 
> ...


...and,

6. (although technically it's step 1) ... Victorine wrote a very entertaining and well-written novel.

Price only gets a person so far... without the quality of the writing, the sales spurt wouldn't have lasted. It went from a spurt to a steady sales stream for Vicki because she wrote a great novel.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

CraigInTwinCities said:


> ...and,
> 
> 6. (although technically it's step 1) ... Victorine wrote a very entertaining and well-written novel.
> 
> Price only gets a person so far... without the quality of the writing, the sales spurt wouldn't have lasted. It went from a spurt to a steady sales stream for Vicki because she wrote a great novel.


Good price and an excellent product works every time.


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## Alexis-Shore (Feb 20, 2011)

Gah, curse this interminable wait for my bookshelf to go live again.

I'm gagging at the bit to drop the price to 99 cents.

I'm hoping that by whining it will magically make it happen.


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## Alexis-Shore (Feb 20, 2011)

Ha, it worked.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Alexis-Shore said:


> Ha, it worked.


Congrats. Now you have to wait for the price to change.


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## Alexis-Shore (Feb 20, 2011)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> Congrats. Now you have to wait for the price to change.


Shhhh.


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## rsullivan9597 (Nov 18, 2009)

David Derrico said:


> Thanks for sharing the figures, everyone. Kevis, I think you may be right about science fiction not being a genre where 99 cents works very well as a pricing strategy.


Have you looked at the Science fiction bestseller list? It is riddled with $0.99 books.


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## David Derrico (Nov 18, 2009)

rsullivan9597 said:


> Have you looked at the Science fiction bestseller list? It is riddled with $0.99 books.


Certainly there are some: 17 of the top 100 at $1 or less when I just checked (compared to 25 on the overall Top 100). And most e-books will sell better at $0.99 than $2.99, I'm not debating that. But, in my experience, and from several other indie sci-fi authors I've heard from, they haven't sold nearly 6x as well, which is the break-even point.

I'm not saying it won't work for any individual book; I think the only way to know is to experiment with your own pricing and see what works for you. I'm just looking for patterns here and trying to share my own experiences. But $0.99 clearly doesn't work well for all books, and it seems to me it's less likely to work in the sci-fi genre.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

rsullivan9597 said:


> Have you looked at the Science fiction bestseller list? It is riddled with $0.99 books.


Man, I just looked at the mystery best seller lists. It looks like everything is now riddled with 99 cent books now. (It was only a matter of time, I suppose.) I'm going back to dig into the sub-genres....


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

You can see that my sales dropped back down again to only slightly higher than before the little boost, but it seems like most of my books were selling at a lower rate today, so that might a sign that the holiday was slowing things down across the board. It might actually be a good thing if the push from that great blog mention has worn off completely and I could stay selling in the 40s for the time being.


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## Alexis-Shore (Feb 20, 2011)

Okay, I've dropped my prices now.

Is it understood on these forums that when we say 99cents we mean before tax?

I'll let you know what the price change does to my sales, if anything.

At least now I can say Bitten is literally a cheap thrill.

I'll be publishing my second one in the next few days, and I think I'll start that off at the bargain price too.

x


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## Eric C (Aug 3, 2009)

David Derrico said:


> And most e-books will sell better at $0.99 than $2.99, I'm not debating that. But, in my experience, and from several other indie sci-fi authors I've heard from, they haven't sold nearly 6x as well, which is the break-even point.


Let's take this analysis a step further. Six times is the break even point ONLY if you consider that one book in isolation and ONLY if your writing is incapable of generating a following.

I've got a $2.99 book that is being outsold by my 99 cent book by a ratio of 45 to 1, last I checked. Let's assume that half the people who purchase my 99 cent book will never read it because the cost of the purchase was low enough to be an impulse purchase, low enough to forget about. (No one really knows what the ratio is, and I don't actually believe that half will never read it, but I'm being generous here with the calculations.) Let's assume both books are equally marketable so that we can assume there are at least 22 times as many readers reading that 99 cent book than would read it at a price of $2.99. So basically what I'm giving up in revenue via the low price and lower royalty rate pays for advertising to thousands if not tens of thousands of readers I wouldn't have otherwise reached in a given year. And make no mistake about it, it's immersive advertising: all these people are exposed not to a daily banner or some such thing, but to to a complete work of mine.

The mass exposure is useless if my work isn't strong enough to lead to readers purchasing another work of mine (preferably at a price of $2.99 or more). The exposure is near priceless if the work is indeed strong enough.


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## David Derrico (Nov 18, 2009)

Eric C said:


> Let's take this analysis a step further. Six times is the break even point ONLY if you consider that one book in isolation and ONLY if your writing is incapable of generating a following.


Yes, it's definitely true that you need to look at the effect of the pricing on your works as a whole. I was just keeping things simple, if you only had one book. For those with multiple books (especially in a series), $0.99 as a loss-leader -- IF it leads to enough extra sales of your $2.99+ books -- could be a good strategy for some.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Eric C said:


> The mass exposure is useless if my work isn't strong enough to lead to readers purchasing another work of mine (preferably at a price of $2.99 or more). The exposure is near priceless* if the work is indeed strong enough.*


And that's the key, isn't it. I'm banking on it, but only time will tell. If it works, there should be a lag of a couple of weeks and then an identifiable uptick in sales of the sequel to The Righteous.


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## Eric C (Aug 3, 2009)

MichaelWallace said:


> And that's the key, isn't it. I'm banking on it, but only time will tell. If it works, there should be a lag of a couple of weeks and then an identifiable uptick in sales of the sequel to The Righteous.


Having been at this game for over a year now Michael I counsel patience. A heck of a lot of people take months to getting around to reading a 99 cent purchase, based on anecdotal evidence on the Kindle forums and elsewhere. My $2.99 novel really didn't sell well at all its first six months but this month is finally starting to sell, despite only having one review, last I checked. I had to sell 12,000 copies of my 99 cent novel before it really started to impact the other book.

If I were a better salesman and sought out more reviews and pushed my books harder, etc., that six month lull might've been cut in half though.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Alexis-Shore said:


> Okay, I've dropped my prices now.
> 
> Is it understood on these forums that when we say 99cents we mean before tax?
> 
> ...


In general, indie ebooks aren't taxed. The big publishers that use the agency model are taxed and I think if you live in the State of Washington, you're taxed, but not otherwise.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

One of my 99 cent novelettes beat out my best selling full-length novel which is priced at $2.99. It's been inching up for months now and finally pulled ahead by about 30%. It's ahead in the UK market by about 40%. It's not just the price. People love that little book. It outsells my other two novelettes combined. It's only got 4 reviews.


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## sighdone (Feb 4, 2011)

My plan is to drop the price of Rotten Apple to $.99 and 99p when I release my next effort.

Has anyone had complaints or returns after dropping the price?


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

sighdone said:


> My plan is to drop the price of Rotten Apple to $.99 and 99p when I release my next effort.
> 
> Has anyone had complaints or returns after dropping the price?


No complaints and no returns.


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## RachelHowzell (Nov 4, 2010)

One return so far. Hate seeing that '1' there -- I hate clutter...

Rachel


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

RachelHowzell said:


> One return so far. Hate seeing that '1' there -- I hate clutter...
> 
> Rachel


The more I sell, the more returns I have (not on the recently marked down novel). It's the Babe Ruth syndrome. He was king of the home runs but also king of the strike outs. As long as the returns don't get anywhere near close to the sales, I'm okay. I've learned to look at only the far right column and selectively block out the column next to it. No easy feat. It took weeks of eyeball training.


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## Victorine (Apr 23, 2010)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> The more I sell, the more returns I have (not on the recently marked down novel). It's the Babe Ruth syndrome. He was king of the home runs but also king of the strike outs. As long as the returns don't get anywhere near close to the sales, I'm okay. I've learned to look at only the far right column and selectively block out the column next to it. No easy feat. It took weeks of eyeball training.


Yes, that's what I do too. I have to totally ignore the returns or I get depressed.

Vicki


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## Monique (Jul 31, 2010)

Victorine said:


> Yes, that's what I do too. I have to totally ignore the returns or I get depressed.
> 
> Vicki


Ditto.

Fwiw, the "Victorine Method" is working for me, so far.


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## RachelHowzell (Nov 4, 2010)

It's the squeaky wheel syndrome: _"Why, oh why didn't they like it? What turned them off? Was it a clicking mistake? How far did they get? What could I have done better?"_

What about all the good, the higher number to the right of that single return? The good reviews behind those numbers?

I need to do some eyeball-yoga. And stop being a neurotic writer. Eyeball-yoga will be easier.

R.


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## DDScott (Aug 13, 2010)

I'm also going with the super fabulous Victorine Method (if you're referring to the amazing Victorine Lieske's 99 Cent Price Point), and wow is it ever, ever working great for me!

I'll be sharing all my Real Numbers this coming Monday (2/2 on my grog *The WG2E  * - The Writers Guide to Epublishing - your destination site for Everything Epublishing. And, I'll of course let y'all know the scoop here too!!!

Here's the scoop on my books and how I promoted the drop here on the KindleBoards as well as on all my cyber home sites:

I'm sooo thrilled to be able to offer y'all the opportunity to escape into the Chick Lit Gone Country World of my Bootscootin' Books Series for less than a trip to your local dollar store!

*BOOTSCOOTIN' BLAHNIKS  * - Book One in the series - think Sex and The City meets Urban Cowboy is now available for 99 Cents!!!

You can then keep right on going with the Bootscootin' Books Series for $2.99 each for books two and three - STOMPIN' ON STETSONS and BUCKLES ME BABY.

For STOMPIN' ON STETSONS, think Hell's Kitchen mixed with Meet the Fockers.

And for BUCKLES ME BABY, it's all about paparazzi-hell and Ponzi-scheme fall-out meet home-shopping and Babies "R" Us.

What a treat that here on Kindle you can read an entire series for less than one paperback book at any brick-and-mortar store!!! I luuuvvv that about Kindle, don't you?!

Anyhoo...I thought I'd share recent reviews I've received for the Bootscootin' Books...to give y'all a taste of the series.

Praise for BOOTSCOOTIN' BLAHNIKS:

"What a light, fun read with lots of laughs...and love. Roxy Rae and Zayne have danced right onto my (cyber) keeper shelf. I'm looking forward to reading more from the very talented D. D. Scott." --- Heather Webber, author of The Lucy Valentine Novels

"I love this book. The tone, setting, the quirky characters and the witty and sexy repartee made this a rip-roaring, laugh-a-minute, entertaining and sexy read." --- D. Love "voracious reader"

Praise for STOMPIN' ON STETSONS:

"D. D. Scott knows how to deliver a rockin' good time! Book two in the Bootscootin' books delivers more good fun, sassy characters, a pick-up truck full of laughs, and the promise of more to come as the series continues." --- Misa Ramirez, author of The Lola Cruz Mysteries

"D. D. Scott delivered another great story about family and love...I'm so happy to see the same characters from her Bootscootin' Blahniks revisited here. Her characters are getting more fun and quirky&#8230;I can't wait to read more from D. D." --- Tonya Kappes, author of CARPE BEAD 'EM

***Average Amazon Customer Review = 5 Stars***

I'm sooo looking forward to getting to know all of you!!!

Happy Reading!!! --- D. D. Scott

**********************

I'm looking forward to comparing and sharing success notes with y'all!

Thanks for this thread, Michael!


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Slight uptick in my sales today to 50. My overall ranking slipped to about 1,000 by the end of the day, however, which tells me that more books overall were sold today. Still, it was nice to see a positive direction. I worried a little that I had sales in the 30s my first couple of days at the new price, followed by the boost, and that they were then going to slip to where they were before the favorable blog post, or perhaps even lower.

For the first time, the sequel to The Righteous, Mighty and Strong, was my second best selling book, although this is more due to a weak day by Devil's Deep and Implant, rather than a significant improvement in M&S. If people are actually reading that 99 cent book, I should shortly see the beginnings of the knock-on effect for the sequel.


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## Alexis-Shore (Feb 20, 2011)

That's encouraging news Michael.

I published my second book at the $.99 price today, and saw lots of interest on Smashwords and Amazon.

My next one will be a short thing, with a man on the cover. I'm wondering what effect this will have, and whether the shorter length will see a quicker uptick in follow ups (or returns).


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## MrPLD (Sep 23, 2010)

While I cannot compare in sales to most of the people here, we have gone from 2/mth (yes, you read that right, TWO A MONTH) to 11 in the last 10 days.  We were doing better in the past but taking a 3 months break with no promotional activity killed everything - my fault there.

Paul.


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## Sharlow (Dec 20, 2009)

The Vickorine method is working great for me. I put stats so far on this link:

http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,53879.msg921949.html#msg921949

I figured rather then writing it all down again, I should just link it. Thanks Vicki for sharing your principle. I have another sequel to a different series coming out in the next month or two, so I have lowered the first book to 0.99 as well in order to try and build a larger readers base for it. So far things are looking good for it as well. It seems to be following the same pattern that Fallen Blood did. Of course it's still the first month so it will take a another two months to see if it follows in Fallen Bloods footsteps as well.


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## Consuelo Saah Baehr (Aug 27, 2010)

I did a price drop for Best Friends about thirty-six hours ago and sales went from 5 to 19.  It's so dramatic, I want to leave it there for a while.
All the other books have done their regular thing: one or two copies a day.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Sharlow said:


> The Vickorine method is working great for me. I put stats so far on this link:
> 
> http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,53879.msg921949.html#msg921949
> 
> I figured rather then writing it all down again, I should just link it. Thanks Vicki for sharing your principle. I have another sequel to a different series coming out in the next month or two, so I have lowered the first book to 0.99 as well in order to try and build a larger readers base for it. So far things are looking good for it as well. It seems to be following the same pattern that Fallen Blood did. Of course it's still the first month so it will take a another two months to see if it follows in Fallen Bloods footsteps as well.





> I'm not sure why everyone keeps making a big deal about prices here these day's. Do what works for you. If low prices work, great. If high works, go for it. No system is a blanket right choice.


You said it, brother.

The only reason I hesitated dropping Listen To Your Heart to 99 cents is that it's 68K and I thought it might make the 10K books look overpriced at 99 cents. I know that 50K is supposed to be a full length novel, but I've never been comfortable with that. I'm keeping it at 99 cents indefinitely.


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## DDScott (Aug 13, 2010)

Wow, Y'All!!!

The Victorine Method is a smashing success for my books...and I've only been doing this since Thursday night at 9:30 PM!!!

I've now sold approx 78 books since then...and here's the thing...I'm of course killin' it with the 99 Cent Book - BOOTSCOOTIN' BLAHNIKS...but I'm wayyy up across the board on all four of my titles!!!

I'm putting out there via my blogs, grogs, Fb, and Twitter that at this price, our fabulous readers can read my entire Bootscootin' Series - which has an average of 5 star reviews all the way from book one to book three - for less than the price of one, traditionally published paperback book...and what's more, I'm making more royalties now than I would with an entire series of paperback books!!! Would you believe it's also bumping sales for my non-fiction on-writing book too - MUSE THERAPY?!

I'll post all the Real Numbers to date on my Victorine Method experience this coming Monday on my WG2E site...and of course let you know here too!!!

I'm sooo thankful you've started this Board, Michael!

We all have sooo much to learn from each other!!! And only by sharing these Real Numbers can we all make the best decisions for our individual careers!


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## Patrick Skelton (Jan 7, 2011)

I sort of talked some smack about the Victorine method previously, but I just might have try it soon.


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## Tara Maya (Nov 4, 2010)

I have two novellettes at $0.99, an anthology at $.2.99 and a novel (50,000 words) at $4.99. So far the novel is the best seller, and the anthology is the next best seller. That is proportional to how much I promote them, although before my novel came out, I was solely promoting the anthology, without much result. Given the low sales of my novellettes, however, I'm reluctant to put my novel to $0.99. I might try it after Book 2 of the The Unfinished Song comes out.


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## HelenSmith (Mar 17, 2010)

I mentioned my experiment with Three Sisters (The Emily Castles Mysteries) - it's the first story in a cozy mystery series, priced at 99 cents. It's short fiction, almost novella-length at 17,000 words.

I read Switch's post on 18th February on ireaderreview.com and that convinced me to try a novel at 99 cents, too. I have dropped the price of The Miracle Inspector to 99 cents in the US and 70p in the UK.

Wish me luck! And in the mean time, I wish all the best to everyone else who is experimenting with pricing. Actually, I wish all the best to anyone who is trying to promote their books, whether using price or something else to attract readers.


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## HelenSmith (Mar 17, 2010)

I have written about my experiments in format and pricing on my blog.


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## 25803 (Oct 24, 2010)

I'm coming late to the party, but I'm going to try the $.99 pricing on my new release for the month of March.  Originally priced it at $2.99 and it has only sold 14 US and 1 UK since it went live on Valentine's.  The official launch of the book is 3/1, so I will run it as an introductory price for the month.  I have a KB banner scheduled for 3/2 and will announce it here on that day plus on my blog/etc.  Anything else I should do?

Thanks!


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

KathyCarmichael said:


> I'm coming late to the party, but I'm going to try the $.99 pricing on my new release for the month of March. Originally priced it at $2.99 and it has only sold 14 US and 1 UK since it went live on Valentine's. The official launch of the book is 3/1, so I will run it as an introductory price for the month. I have a KB banner scheduled for 3/2 and will announce it here on that day plus on my blog/etc. Anything else I should do?
> 
> Thanks!


Make sure you change the price a day or two ahead of time so it updates on time.

Also put the price change in your signature. You might think about putting it on your banner as a "limited time" offer.


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## 25803 (Oct 24, 2010)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> Make sure you change the price a day or two ahead of time so it updates on time.
> 
> Also put the price change in your signature. You might think about putting it on your banner as a "limited time" offer.


Thanks, Gertie!

I already put the price changes through on Kindle and Pubit this morning (not going to do smashwords since I'm still toasting in smashhell waiting for it to be approved for over 2 weeks now).

I added the $.99 to my banner, but didn't add "limited time" to it. Maybe I should redo it and add that?

Thanks so much! -- KC


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## 25803 (Oct 24, 2010)

Wow.  I just checked and the pricing change already went through at both sites.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

KathyCarmichael said:


> Thanks, Gertie!
> 
> I already put the price changes through on Kindle and Pubit this morning (not going to do smashwords since I'm still toasting in smashhell waiting for it to be approved for over 2 weeks now).
> 
> ...


I suggested "limited time" because it conveys a sense of urgency, but it's up to you.



KathyCarmichael said:


> Wow. I just checked and the pricing change already went through at both sites.


Smashwords goes through right away. Amazon usually takes a day or two but I've noticed they've been better about it lately.

Good luck with your banner. I've done well with the two I had.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

You can see that sales were taking off like a rocket until yesterday, when they stagnated. I briefly hit #50 in the thriller list and #198 in the overall list. Yesterday, however, my book stopped showing up on the "also bought" list of someone important and my sales started to sink. They were almost stagnant overnight, with only a handful of sales.

Nothing else has changed. I didn't get any good reviews or any great blog mentions and nothing bad happened yesterday. I'm sure this is the case in the real world as well, but it's bizarre to see just how random success can be. All in all, I can't complain and I'm trying to remind myself that a week ago I stated that 50 sales per day (about the rate I'm working since yesterday afternoon, when things stagnated) was my goal. So if I look at those few exciting days as an anomaly, then I can be happy about where I am.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

MichaelWallace said:


> You can see that sales were taking off like a rocket until yesterday, when they stagnated. I briefly hit #50 in the thriller list and #198 in the overall list. Yesterday, however, my book stopped showing up on the "also bought" list of someone important and my sales started to sink. They were almost stagnant overnight, with only a handful of sales.
> 
> Nothing else has changed. I didn't get any good reviews or any great blog mentions and nothing bad happened yesterday. I'm sure this is the case in the real world as well, but it's bizarre to see just how random success can be. All in all, I can't complain and I'm trying to remind myself that a week ago I stated that 50 sales per day (about the rate I'm working since yesterday afternoon, when things stagnated) was my goal. So if I look at those few exciting days as an anomaly, then I can be happy about where I am.


Something was going on yesterday. My sales dropped like a stone also. That included my free short story. Very frustrating.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> Something was going on yesterday. My sales dropped like a stone also. That included my free short story. Very frustrating.


It wasn't just that sales were down, it's that my overall ranking dropped from 200 to 400. It had been climbing for days and I would have been delighted had it stayed in the top 200. Disappointing to see it drop, but I'd still be happy with a top 400 book, if I can keep that ranking for a few weeks or months instead of a few days.

But in general I agree with you, I would have expected the ranking to drop farther and faster than it did, so it seems like sales in the general Kindle store were slower as well.


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## Alexis-Shore (Feb 20, 2011)

I had to put my prices back up because I'm about to publish a short story that I want to price at 99c. I wasn't sure I could justify offering the longer works at the same price.

Was that the wrong idea do you think?


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Alexis-Shore said:


> I had to put my prices back up because I'm about to publish a short story that I want to price at 99c. I wasn't sure I could justify offering the longer works at the same price.
> 
> Was that the wrong idea do you think?


I struggled with that, too. My thought was novelettes at .99, novellas at 1.99 and novels at 2.99.

My three novelettes are 30-35 pages; about the same length so no problem pricing them all at 99 cents. I have three novels at 68K, 111K and 168K. I priced them all at $2.99 initially.

But like you, I was concerned about the big difference in length for the same price. I wanted to reduce my 68K novel to 99 cents, but it really didn't fit in with the shorter works. Finally, I bit the bullet and lowered the price. I'll hold it there for a while, maybe two months to see what happens, and then I might raise it to $1.99 just so it doesn't hurt the other 99 centers.

This pricing thing gives me a headache.


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## MrPLD (Sep 23, 2010)

We were very pained to move to 99c... same reasons, it's a 120,000 word book, been through an editor and proofer etc, _we_ feel the book is worth more but realistically we haven't cracked through that first layer of ice yet so we have to sacrafice our first child for the greater good :cough cough: . That said, what we'll probably do is when Guardian comes out next month, we'll make -that- 99c and move Tree of Life back to $2.99.

Paul.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

I've updated the thread to fill in what happened next. Obviously, this worked out beyond my wildest dreams. The Righteous climbed as high as the top 20 of the overall Kindle store and spent several weeks in the top 100. It is just now about to fall out (ranking: #99) and I'm sure I have thousands more sales of this book to look forward to, thanks to Amazon algorithms boosting what I believe is a strong book.


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## carolco (Apr 15, 2011)

MichaelWallace said:


> I've updated the thread to fill in what happened next. Obviously, this worked out beyond my wildest dreams.


That is amazing. Excellent move.


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## Sara Pierce (May 15, 2011)

This is amazing! Thanks for the dedicated number-crunching, looks like congratulations are in order!!


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## CJArcher (Jan 22, 2011)

THat's awesome, Michael, congrats.  Glad to see it worked out well for you - of course it must be a great book too.  99 cents isn't going to get you into the top 100 and keep you there alone.  I hope you keep selling many more copies.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Thank you, CJ. It seemed like a good day to post the final update, as I finally fell out of the top 100 after almost seven weeks. It was a thrilling run and it's almost a relief, after weeks of falling, to not have to worry how much longer I'd be up there. Now, if I can just stay in the top 200. 

_
# Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #101 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

* #30 in Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Thrillers
* #33 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Mystery & Thrillers
* #80 in Books > Literature & Fiction
_


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## DDScott (Aug 13, 2010)

MichaelWallace said:


> Thank you, CJ. It seemed like a good day to post the final update, as I finally fell out of the top 100 after almost seven weeks. It was a thrilling run and it's almost a relief, after weeks of falling, to not have to worry how much longer I'd be up there. Now, if I can just stay in the top 200.
> 
> _
> # Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #101 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
> ...


Great numbers, Michael! Huge congrats to you!!!

And I'm piping-in again to vouch for the 99 Cent Price-Point too, based on my latest sales numbers and experiences!

I went with the 99 Cent Price-Point mid-February for Book One in my Bootscootin' Books Series...up to that point, my highest month was right around 75 sales.

Now, last month (May 2011), I made the Amazon 1000 Sales-a-Month Club...and it's wayyy beyond clear that my success, in part, has been from the added exposure that 99 cent price-point can get u.

It is all about great books for great prices!!!

When readers find both...that's what serves as the tipping point to catapult an author's career!

Here's a link to my analysis of my numbers:

http://thewritersguidetoepublishing.com/kindle-1000-sales-a-month-club-in-dollars-and-cents

http://thewritersguidetoepublishing.com/do-you-want-to-be-the-snickers-bar-of-ebooks-i-do


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## JumpingShip (Jun 3, 2010)

DDScott said:


> Great numbers, Michael! Huge congrats to you!!!
> 
> And I'm piping-in again to vouch for the 99 Cent Price-Point too, based on my latest sales numbers and experiences!
> 
> ...


Congrats! You just reminded me that I will be in that club this month! Woo-hoo! 

About the 99 cent experiment. I was planning on changing No Good Deed back to $2.99 this week. I had scheduled a Frugal Ereader promo back in late April to run on June 2nd, so I figured a few days after that, I'd change it. My May sales were dismal. Horrible. Ugh. I think I was down to 10/day of that book and about 2-3 of the second. I played around with pricing on Smashwords in mid-May, making it free for a few days, then changed my mind and went back to 99 cents. A few weeks later, on the 26th, Amazon made No Good Deed free!

Since then, it's been a whirlwind. After about 45,000 total free downloads, it went back to 99 cents. Sales have been very, very good, so I'd be crazy to change it right now. 
However, I have a feeling it won't stay really good. Even now, I know those Sunshine Deals are hurting all of us Indies. I can tell because my book is #8 in Thrillers, and I think at least 5 of the ones ahead of me are Sunshine Deal books. Those books are older bestsellers, so probably would have just been plugging along at their normal non-bestseller status if not for Amazon having the ad on every page.


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## Maria Romana (Jun 7, 2010)

MaryMcDonald said:


> Even now, I know those Sunshine Deals are hurting all of us Indies. I can tell because my book is #8 in Thrillers, and I think at least 5 of the ones ahead of me are Sunshine Deal books. Those books are older bestsellers, so probably would have just been plugging along at their normal non-bestseller status if not for Amazon having the ad on every page.


A bit OT, but yeah, that ad has been bugging the heck out of me. I know Amazon does a million things to help us market our books, but we work hard, too, to drive people to our book pages there on Amazon, so I resent having a huge sign in the middle of my book page urging people to go look at a bunch of other books as soon as they get there.

 Maria


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## Debra Burroughs (Feb 17, 2011)

Congratulations, Michael! It's always good to see real numbers and growing success!  Keep it up!


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## JumpingShip (Jun 3, 2010)

meromana said:


> A bit OT, but yeah, that ad has been bugging the heck out of me. I know Amazon does a million things to help us market our books, but we work hard, too, to drive people to our book pages there on Amazon, so I resent having a huge sign in the middle of my book page urging people to go look at a bunch of other books as soon as they get there.
> 
> Maria


Yeah. I can't really complain because of my recent good fortune, but it does seem a bit overzealous of Amazon. lol


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## DDScott (Aug 13, 2010)

MaryMcDonald said:


> Congrats! You just reminded me that I will be in that club this month! Woo-hoo!
> 
> About the 99 cent experiment. I was planning on changing No Good Deed back to $2.99 this week. I had scheduled a Frugal Ereader promo back in late April to run on June 2nd, so I figured a few days after that, I'd change it. My May sales were dismal. Horrible. Ugh. I think I was down to 10/day of that book and about 2-3 of the second. I played around with pricing on Smashwords in mid-May, making it free for a few days, then changed my mind and went back to 99 cents. A few weeks later, on the 26th, Amazon made No Good Deed free!
> 
> ...


Superfab cool and congrats to you, Mary, on your terrific sales and for making the 1000 Sales-a-Month Club!

Now...when you said:

"A few weeks later, on the 26th, Amazon made No Good Deed free!"

How did they do that for you? Was your book something they chose for a special event?


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## CJArcher (Jan 22, 2011)

I'm also a convert to the 99 cent price point, especially for the first book in a series.  I learned my lesson the hard way.  In April I had Honor Bound at 99 cents.  It hovered around the low 1,000 ranking for a while. Thinking I'd cash in, I raised the price in May to $2.99.  Slowly, slowly sales began to decrease and my ranking slipped all the way down to about 10,000.  It wasn't so bad because I was making about the same amount of money, but my other books also decreased and that really hurt as some of them are $2.99. Worst hit was the sequel Kiss Of Ash.  Sales for that one halved. So a few days ago I lowered the price of Honor Bound back to 99 cents, alerted Daily Cheap Reads and lucky for me it was featured yesterday.  It's ranking dropped (or is that rose?) to 1,244.  I'm sure sales will slip away a little again but hopefully I've converted a few more people who will go on to buy my other books.

Keep up the good work, Michael.  You're on such a roll lately.


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## DDScott (Aug 13, 2010)

CJArcher said:


> *I'm also a convert to the 99 cent price point, especially for the first book in a series. I learned my lesson the hard way. In April I had Honor Bound at 99 cents. It hovered around the low 1,000 ranking for a while. Thinking I'd cash in, I raised the price in May to $2.99. Slowly, slowly sales began to decrease and my ranking slipped all the way down to about 10,000. * It wasn't so bad because I was making about the same amount of money, but my other books also decreased and that really hurt as some of them are $2.99. Worst hit was the sequel Kiss Of Ash. Sales for that one halved. So a few days ago I lowered the price of Honor Bound back to 99 cents, alerted Daily Cheap Reads and lucky for me it was featured yesterday. It's ranking dropped (or is that rose?) to 1,244. I'm sure sales will slip away a little again but hopefully I've converted a few more people who will go on to buy my other books.
> 
> Keep up the good work, Michael. You're on such a roll lately.


Sooo tickled to hear you're also a 99 Cent Price Point Peep, CJ!

And I sooo hear ya about once you're at the 99 Cent Price, you stay there.

I've been watching Konrath's latest experiment carefully...where each month or so he chooses a couple different books to take to that price point to bump 'em to the Top 100 List. But I'm thinkin' it may work for him to bounce between prices because he's got tons of books on his cyber store shelves...


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Still experimenting. I dropped the price of everything to 99 for 6-8 weeks. Sales doubled and in some cases tripled. That's 7 books from 10K to 168K. 

Then I raised the anthology and the novella to $1.99. Sales halved but $$$ stayed the same.

110K novel to $2.99 and 168K novel to $3.99. A bold move, I know. Sales on both have dropped but since I never reached that magic 6x number at 99, the $$$ have actually increased.

The three novelettes will stay at 99.


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## CJArcher (Jan 22, 2011)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> Still experimenting. I dropped the price of everything to 99 for 6-8 weeks. Sales doubled and in some cases tripled. That's 7 books from 10K to 168K.
> 
> Then I raised the anthology and the novella to $1.99. Sales halved but $$$ stayed the same.
> 
> ...


Good luck to you Margaret. I'll be interested to know how the sales continue in the long term.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

CJArcher said:


> Good luck to you Margaret. I'll be interested to know how the sales continue in the long term.


Moneywise, my six weeks report is already increasing. I'll report again at the end of the month.


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## JumpingShip (Jun 3, 2010)

DDScott said:


> Superfab cool and congrats to you, Mary, on your terrific sales and for making the 1000 Sales-a-Month Club!
> 
> Now...when you said:
> 
> ...


I wish I could tell you the answer to that, but it's a mystery to me as well. Especially since as far as I knew, it was no longer free on any venue at the time it was free on Amazon. ie, I did not rush out and put the price back to 99 cents because it already was at that price. After one week, they made it paid again.


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## &#039; (May 24, 2011)

MaryMcDonald said:


> My May sales were dismal. Horrible. Ugh. I think I was down to 10/day of that book and about 2-3 of the second. I played around with pricing on Smashwords in mid-May, making it free for a few days, then changed my mind and went back to 99 cents. A few weeks later, on the 26th, Amazon made No Good Deed free!
> 
> Since then, it's been a whirlwind. After about 45,000 total free downloads, it went back to 99 cents. Sales have been very, very good, so I'd be crazy to change it right now.
> However, I have a feeling it won't stay really good. Even now, I know those Sunshine Deals are hurting all of us Indies. I can tell because my book is #8 in Thrillers, and I think at least 5 of the ones ahead of me are Sunshine Deal books. Those books are older bestsellers, so probably would have just been plugging along at their normal non-bestseller status if not for Amazon having the ad on every page.


Hi Mary,

Your book (NGD) was free between May 26th and June 1st? Seven days? The downloads reached 45,000. That's over 6,000 downloads per day. On another thread, you said the book had been downloaded 4,000 times. Please could you give some precise figures about the number of days the book was free and the number of downloads per day?

Thanks!


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## DDScott (Aug 13, 2010)

We've got a terrific conversation going today regarding *The 99 Cent Price Point and What It Can Do For Your $2.99 Ebooks* on my grog The WG2E!

We'd luuuvvv to have you join our conversation!

http://thewritersguidetoepublishing.com/the-99-cent-ebook-price-point-what-can-it-do-for-your-2-99-titles


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

DDScott said:


> We've got a terrific conversation going today regarding *The 99 Cent Price Point and What It Can Do For Your $2.99 Ebooks* on my grog The WG2E!
> 
> We'd luuuvvv to have you join our conversation!
> 
> http://thewritersguidetoepublishing.com/the-99-cent-ebook-price-point-what-can-it-do-for-your-2-99-titles


For me it doesn't make sense to have a 10K book the same price as a 168K book. Nobody's going to buy the shorty at 99 when they can get the full-length novels for the same price. Sure, sales of the full-length novels increased by 2 and 3x's, but not enough to justify keeping that 99 price going. I've got everything priced by length now and I feel those prices are fair. Sales are down but $$$ are up.

I'm not saying that I'll keep the prices the same forever. I'll run promotions and sales whenever I put out something new.


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## &#039; (May 24, 2011)

DDScott said:


> Superfab cool and congrats to you, Mary, on your terrific sales and for making the 1000 Sales-a-Month Club!
> 
> Now...when you said:
> 
> ...


Hi DD,

Check out this thread to find out how to make your books free on Amazon:

http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,69170.0.html


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## JumpingShip (Jun 3, 2010)

Shelagh said:


> Hi Mary,
> 
> Your book (NGD) was free between May 26th and June 1st? Seven days? The downloads reached 45,000. That's over 6,000 downloads per day. On another thread, you said the book had been downloaded 4,000 times. Please could you give some precise figures about the number of days the book was free and the number of downloads per day?
> 
> Thanks!


My book was free from May 26 through June 2nd. June 3rd I woke up and it was once again paid. The very first day it was free, I had over 9,000 downloads. Watching the KDP numbers change so quickly was about the most fun I've ever had! lol.

Over the next week, there were 45,000 downloads between the US and UK, as it was also free there. The vast majority of downloads were on the US site--probably 40,000.

At 2:10 a.m. on June 3rd, I just happened to wake up, and since I can check my KDP on my Kindle super quick, I looked to see how many more downloads there were. For the month at that time, it was 4760 (downloads had slowed, but still not a bad amount for the first two days of the month.) I didn't know it at that time as I didn't check the Amazon store for price, but I'm assuming the book was made paid at midnight Seattle time--where Amazon is based. If that's the case, I looked at KDP only ten minutes after that as my time zone is two hours ahead. I'm now basing my sales portion of June by subtracting 4760 from my total sales. It would be nice if Amazon made it a seperate line, but I'm not complaining.  I'm just glad I looked so I have a pretty close estimate.


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## &#039; (May 24, 2011)

Thanks Mary! Two of my books are still free for download (since June 3rd). The first day, _The Power of Persuasion_ was downloaded 2,800 times on amazon.com, but by mid afternoon the following day, _Four Short Stories_ had only been downloaded 22 times on amazon.co.uk! There had been so many complaints about self-promotion on the Kindle forums, I didn't know how to proceed. I decided to risk the backlash and started a new thread about the free download:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/forum/kindle/ref=cm_cd__ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx3IRFCNF3E5K2W&cdThread=TxQ3CSERB24WSS&displayType=tagsDetail

Downloads picked up and 1,000 copies had been downloaded by midnight June 7th. Today, the total has gone up to 2,020 and _The Power of Persuasion_ has been downloaded 4,125 times, giving a total of 6,145 downloads in eleven days (compared to one day for NGD!).

I can keep track of the royalties by clicking on the "Prior six weeks roylaties" link in KDP. The free books are listed with the paid downloads but have no royalties attached to them. The royalties show up on Sundays and are listed as week ending Saturday, month, year.

The downloads for the amazon.com site have slowed to around 20-25 per day, while the downloads on the amazon.co.uk site are about 120-150 per day. _The Power of Persuasion_ made it to #1 in free Kindle Store in the category Literary Fiction and stayed there for three days. _Four Short Stories_ is still #1 in free Kindle Store in the category Short Stories after eight days and remains in the top #100 free in Kindle Store (overall free ebooks):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Four-Short-Stories-ebook/dp/B004NIFTHY/

My figures are not so impressive as yours, Mary, but I guess I am just as excited as you! LOL!


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## JumpingShip (Jun 3, 2010)

For me, timing was everything. If my book had been made free even six months ago, it wouldn't have done so well. It has been out on Kindle for over a year now and had a decent number of sales and reviews and had at least a small fanbase and some word of mouth.(55 reviews prior to being made free, IIRC). It had a 4.5 rating over those reviews. I saw some people post in the free thread on Amazon Kindle forum that they had seen it but hadn't quite pulled the trigger on one-clicking it. Being made free made it an easy decision. 

I have had three different covers, but the one I have now, (courtesy of Imogen Rose  ) is so much better than my other ones, plus, five months ago I finished the second book in the series and I know lots of people like series. 

So, if there is a lesson here, it's even though we want instant success, sometimes it's better to let it build so the success can last a little while and have some 'legs'.


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