The rise of the 99-cent Kindle e-book

An actual book written to be sold at a dollar isn't expected to be much. In fact, I would assume any book written for that price point is probably one of those scammy "Send me $20 for a PDF all about being a video game wizard!" website type of books.

However, for content that would otherwise be languishing, it can be a terrific move.

Like Jerry Pournelle said, 70% is a hell of a lot more than you ever get from a publisher. Hell, 30% is a hell of a lot more than you ever get. Ten percent (what you'd get from a publisher) on a $20 book is going to get an author a couple bucks. On Kindle, they could sell it for $3 and still make more money.

And at a buck or three, you're more likely to pick up more spontaneous sales and they can add up to ten or even a hundred thousand sales, pretty fast. If you are smart enough to have included a rights-reversion in your contract, it's a good way to make some additional income on what might otherwise be forgotten and ignored.

I'm a lot more willing to pay $1 for a book than $3, especially for an unknown author and a book that has a description that doesn't say much about the actual book. (Not talking about this author, but in general.) And more than $3 would never happen.

Amazon might actually be doing them a favor by their $2.99 policy, too. It forces everyone to sell for more, keeping the playing field up. If they had the same policy for $.99 items, many authors would just drop the prices and a new floor would be set... And some would drop lower to try to generate sales, just like this guy did.

my 6-year old just wrote/illustrated a 99 cent ebook for the kindle:

http://www.amazon.com/The-little-Bunny-ebook/dp/B004W3FYOS/r...

I have been watching this ebook phenomenon with amazement. I bought 1 e-book: Learning Python. I bought it through almost every store, to see where it works best. Online, offline, laptop, tablet, desktop, phone. My favorite setup: ePub from O'Reilly (no digital restrictions management) on Stanza (not a slave to one store) on the iPad (works offline).

I spent a ton of money on that book, but I found out what works best for me. And I stand to gain something at the end of reading that book. I can't imagine reading contemporary novels when I haven't finished the classics yet. $1 for a contemporary novel seems like I'm paying someone to take 20 hours off my life. It's like whittling, only worse.

I bought a John Locke book once just because of the 99 cent price. John Locke is the pseudonym of the author behind most of the 99 cent Kindle top 20 bestsellers, and probably one of the few that makes 6 figure sales this way.

I read the entire novel hoping that the ending would make up for everything, and in the end I just felt like that was a massive waste of my time and 99 cents. It was a mystery/thriller that ended up being so bad that I was laughing the whole time at the absurdity of everything going on. It was rather well edited, unlike most of the indie and 99 cent crowd, which was all it has going for it. And this book and many others have nearly the same rating by just as many customers as a traditionally published 1000 page behemoth like The Wise Man's Fear, which was (to me) worth every penny of the $15 ebook price and many, many hours spent reading.

I love seeing markets being revolutionized and people self-publishing easily, but the state of 99 cent ebooks today feels to me as bad as an iOS App Store with all 99 cent fart apps as bestsellers would feel. There isn't much quality or thought put into most of these, and the Angry Birds and Tiny Wings of the ebook world are few and far in between. I can only wait and hope to see improvement, instead of seeing more drivel being spewed out by the current set of bestselling 99 cent authors all celebrating their six figure sales of their godawful books.

One of the things driving this is that e-publishing has lowered the entry barrier for people who write "genre fiction". It's easier to get published and put your work out where an audience can find it. By "genre fiction", I mean stuff like military science fiction or vampire romances, etc, that has emotional appeal to a fairly specific audience. In the days before e-publishing, John Norman's Gor books would pretty obvious example of that sort of niche-appeal content.

For this sort of fiction, "well-written" is less important than pushing the right buttons (the plots are usually fairly predictable). To use an analogy, the rise of e-publishing is similar to the rise of blogging, in that they both allow for the easy production and consumption of targeted content (and predictable button-pushing is the raison d'etre of many blogs, particularly those discussing politics).

Note, I'm not claiming all e-publishing is genre-fiction or poorly written, just like all blogs don't fall into the predictable button-pushing category.

Two more thoughts here:

1 - This is almost entirely a fiction phenomenon, at least for now. While there are plenty of nonfiction books priced at 99 cents, the books on the Kindle Top 100 are consistently all-fiction. Even bigger name nonfiction authors who are traditionally or self-published, including NYT bestsellers, are finding it near impossible to hit or stay on that list.

2 - Many of those self-pubbed fiction writers on the kindle top 100 list are using the 99 cent price point for single books as points of entry or loss leaders (though they're actually still making money) into a funnel for a much bigger body of work. Amanda Hocking and J.A. Konrath experimented with rotating certain books into the 99 cent slot knowing that once a reader likes their style, fiction readers often attach to the author in a way nonfiction readers dont. That fuels them to want to read the authors other books...for $2.99 to $4.99. So one 99 cent book can lead to many more higher priced sales and readers for life.

I can't speak to the other fiction categories, but there are a number of readable books in the Kindle SciFi category in the 99-2.99 range. In particular, if you just want to turn off your brain and pick up something in the "space opera" category, it's an excellent release.

When I buy a 2.99 book, I'm not looking for the next Gibson novel. I'm just looking for something that will let me put my brain in neutral that isn't either beer or streaming video.

There's also Amazon singles from the low end. See - http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=2486013011

How far is this from web content supported by advertisement?

Maybe not entirely on-topic, but I'm very willing to pay a dollar or three for a book in the public domain that hasn't had the Project Gutenberg treatment.