An Author Takes a Test Drive

We’ve heard from and about the big name authors like Barry Eisler and J.A. Konrath and Dean Wesley Smith. All of them discussing the move to e-books and how their sales are increasing their income. But most of us, me included, are not big names with big followings and monster sales.

Ann Summerville alerted me to a blog post by an author like most of us (thank you Ann). This author, Carol Denbow, writes nonfiction and has quite a few out. Like the big name authors, she did an experiment. Her books, listed on Kindle for either $4.99 or $2.99, were doing okay. She said she was selling about 20 a month. But she did a month-long experiment “to see if it would be better to list the books at .99 and sell more copies than at the higher price and sell less.”

The post about her results were interesting. Here’s something she noted about Kindle:

At $4.99 a book (actually, any price over $2.99), Kindle offers the author/publisher a 70 percent royalty. But if you lower your list price to under $2.99, they only give you a 30 percent royalty.

Over the month, she sold more copies, but because of the lower royalty, she made less money. But that’s not the end of her story. You’ll want to link over and find out why this experiment increased not just her e-sales but her print-sales, why her ratings went up on Kindle and how this will affect future sales, and why, despite the lower income, she intends to keep the price low for a while longer. She’s giving her test of Kindle another month.

You might want to follow her to keep abreast of her updates on her Kindle experiment.