As e-books become more popular so too will e-book comics. Robot 6 reports that one author Mark Millar found that selling the book cheaper netted more profits than selling it at a higher price.
Although it sounds like a paradox, creators may make more money by lowering prices in order to make more sales, according to one blogger’s analysis of e-book pricing. David Slusher looked at the prices and sales numbers that writer Joe Konrath posted at his blog in 2009. Some of Konrath’s thrillers are published by Hyperion and he self-publishes others, which means he could compare his sales on Kindle for both sets. What he found is that cheaper books sold better. Slusher graphed the numbers and after some additional analysis, came up with $2.99 as the sweet spot at which the price and sales balance out to maximize the author’s take.
I agree with Brigid Alverson who wrote the Robot6 post that this is a single data point and we shouldn’t jump to too many conclusions, but it is interesting to consider – especially if you see your work heading into the iPad and Kindle.
Amazon pays a 70% royalty rate on Kindle ebooks that are priced between $2.99 and $9.99. Outside of that range they pay only 30%. So there was a quick race to the bottom to $2.99, which has now set expectations on the buying side for anything other than the big name bestsellers.
BTW, more than a few comic ebooks have made a technical error in setting up the book such that there is almost no content in the sample. It has to do with how Amazon calculates the size of the sample in relation to the amount of data at the front end of the file. Many comic books use up the data allotment on tables of content and other text, leaving the prospective reader with nothing to see in the sample.