£12.99*
From author Claire King:
Here are five questions for you. Answer fast. No need to write them down:
1) What is your favourite beer/wine/fizzy drink?
2) What toothpaste do you use?
3) How do you choose what films to watch?
4) If you could eat out tonight (at your own expense) where would you go?
5) What does the price of a book tell you?
Got the answers? Good, because today I want to talk about authors as brands. Not about your ‘social media strategy’ or how you wear your hair at book signings. No, I want to talk about what messages you want to send out about your work to people who might want to buy it.
I’m neither a publisher nor a book marketeer, but I do know something about brand management. Once upon a time I used to work for the people who made Pampers, Pringles, Head & Shoulders, Hugo Boss, Max Factor…
And what all those brands have in common is that they aim to stand out in some way. We call it product differentiation: They make your clothes softer, your shave closer, provide greater protection for your baby’s delicate bottom cheeks against the evil of poo. They bring health to your teeth and the appearance of health to your hair. It takes fewer sheets to wipe up a spill, or indeed to, well, wipe. In this way you are better served by the products, your life is made more comfortable or pleasurable in some way. This does not just happen because the TV commercial tells you so, but because a lot of clever people have been working hard for a long time in order to try and make it that way. It is product differentiation that leads you to be able to answer questions 1-4 above with anything other than “I don’t care, whatever is cheapest.” Did any of you say that, by the way?
. . . .
In the world of publishing, how do books differentiate themselves?
- Author credentials (she’s always really funny/moving, he’s famous, her books are always page-turners…)
- Publishing house credentials
- Literary prize endorsements
- Reviews
- Word of mouth
- Retailer credentials?
. . . .
People think they like choice, but in reality they don’t, not so much. Choice is complicated. Packed supermarket shelves are stressful and time consuming. Shopping where you have the choice between apples, oranges and peaches is far less stressful than a choice of a hundred different fruits. And when consumers are faced with a choice where they don’t have the information – or time – to decide, they tend to use price as a measure of quality.
There is an implied value in certain prices. If you see a packet of sausages on sale for 50 cents and another on sale for 4.00€, and you’ve never heard of the manufacturers, chances are you will make a leap of logic as to which will have the more quality ingredients. Which will taste the best. Which will not only satisfy your hunger but also nourish you. In general:
- Very low price = utter rubbish. Does not work, falls to bits.
- Low price = low quality. The thing works. Often sells in bulk.
- Mid price range = mid quality. Mass market. Nice. Towards the bottom end of this range are cheap brands, towards the top end are pricier ones.
- High Price = high quality. It’s durable, or niche, luxurious or has a monopoly on the market.
- Very high price = status symbol.
Link to the rest at Claire King
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1) What is your favourite beer/wine/fizzy drink?
Coke Classic.
2) What toothpaste do you use?
Arm & Hammer Baking Soda toothpaste.
3) How do you choose what films to watch?
If I think it sounds funny or awesome I try to figure out if I can get a babysitter.
4) If you could eat out tonight (at your own expense) where would you go?
A steakhouse.
5) What does the price of a book tell you?
How much it costs.
Oops! I don’t think I learned the lession she wanted me to learn.
I agree with number 5 completely!
I’d say that #5 tells me “look carefully, O wolves,” because it is true that cheaper-than-trabpub (and not on sale from tradpub) means that copy-editing may not be up to my persnickety standards. However, prices above a certain level mean I look elsewhere entirely — I top out around $7 or $8 for what I’ll even consider in ebook; above that, and I might as well get print for sharing/resale value.
But then, I look carefully at tradpub, too, since it can take longer to determine that I don’t actually like it. *sigh*
I totally get her point. I realize people like to be told what to like. I know everyone jumps of the ‘bandwagon’ of certain books/genres.
But just the words ‘branding’ ‘branded’ or ‘brand’ make me want to kick and scream and bust up random objects with a sledgehammer.
Claire has some excellent points, right up until she completely lost me by confusing the result with the cause.
““On aggregate, it looks likely that the €80 billion number will remain relatively stable, as lower e-book prices are compensated for by increased purchases on the part of book buyers as they adopt more tablets and reading devices.”
So the pie, in terms of money, is not actually getting bigger. Which means thousands more authors get a little slice of the pie, but there’s only the same amount of pie to go round. So in the end we all earn less for our efforts.”
The world book market is the result of every customer saying “Oh, I’ll buy this book. And this one. Ah, that looks interesting, too – but not that one.” It is not a government grant pool, where every winner leaves less for the others. By the logic of “there’s only the same amount of pie to go around”, if a popular author priced at 12.99, then several other authors must drop their prices to 0.25 to get the remaining monetary crumbs of the pie. It doesn’t work that way, and is directly contrary to the rest of her message on why authors ought to have higher prices for higher quality work.
When it comes to product differentiation, though, price is only one of the signals a consumer uses to determine quality of a product… and is not used to the exclusion of other signals. To go back to her theoretical sausage example, price is a point – but I would also be looking at the packaging and its information, and the sausages themselves. If the less expensive sausages look just as good, but clearly are being sold as a loss leader, or to attract people into trying an unfamiliar taste / brand, or the more expensive ones are touting organic / fair trade / made with exotic meat, then I’ll may reach a far different conclusion than she expects me to make on price alone.
If I run into a terrible cover, uninspiring blurb, and high price, it’ll get passed over for a good cover, interesting blurb book, regardless of price.
Nice, Dorothy. Thank you for expressing so clearly what I felt reading the article.
Ah, but what if you saw two books with good covers, interesting blurbs, two wildly different price points, AND you were an aggregate pool of ebook consumers instead of a writer/reader with your higher than average background knowledge of production, price, and quality?
All other things being equal, in an infinite number of alternate universes, one price point will sell more of the same book than another. Knowing how to identify that price point will benefit you.
Hello Dorothy,
Perhaps I wasn’t very clear about what I meant vis-a-vis the ‘pie’. Sometimes, as products become cheaper, the market for them grows, both in number of units sold and in the total size of the market. This is often the case with technology advances – digital watches, mobile phones etc. But with books, although there is a new (ish) format that offers a lot of benefits and poses a lot of questions, in actual fact the market for books is not growing in terms of its value.
That means (to me) that whilst more authors can publish, and the fight has been taken to the pricing arena, the outcome is there are more published authors, each earning less. Meanwhile the reader still has to choose where to spend their book budget.
You are absolutely spot on that price is only one of the signals a reader will use. It’s the one I was trying to focus on in this piece, and to suggest as Michael points out above, that the best point isn’t always the cheapest.
I’m not sure that “more published authors, each earning less” works quite like that, yet. When you factor in the better royalties, you can have more published authors, each earning more than prior eras would’ve given, at prices lower for the consumer. The dollars spent on books are more efficiently transmitted to the authors.
Assuming that dollars spent on books does remain flat, this will eventually equalize out, yes, but the pie is being broken up into cookies right now, and they’re shared out more easily than slices. Or, er, some metaphor like that.
“Very low price = utter rubbish. Does not work, falls to bits.”
Four of the top five best-selling ebooks on amazon-uk today were priced at 20p (about $0.30 USD.
Seventeen of the top twenty best-selling ebooks on Christmas Day were priced below £1.00 GBP.
The 20p price matching of Sony by Amazon means the 20p price is alongside the original much, much higher list price. When buyers perceive they are getting a good deal then very low prices work rather well.
I don’t know about Ms King, but I stopped believing in the “High price = Good Quality” myth about 10 years ago.
The way I think is (& I’m sure others do as well is):
“This overpriced branded garbage is made by the same factory in China that is making the cheap value version by Tesco. So why should I pay double/triple? Just to support the overpaid executives of those “branded” companies?”
And again not sure about the rest of the world but here in the UK, the biggest growth in the last year has been in cheap stores- 99p stores, Tescos and Asdas etc. People are going for the cheapest thing they can. Many, like me, have been burnt by buying expensive “branded” goods, only to have them fall apart a year later, while cheap Tesco brand ones continue for years.
As Mark has said above, many of the top selling books were 20p. And these were not by unknown indies, but (usually) by big selling names.
Till last Christmas, I was still buying print books. I spent about £60 ($85 at the time) on about 5 books. When I came home, most of them turned out to be crap, and I only managed to finish one. Again, I don’t know how representative my experience is, but I stopped believing in the “expensive = better books” too. It was like I had grown up. I now knew Santa Claus wasn’t real.
“5) What does the price of a book tell you?”
It tells me nothing. Absolutely nothing.
This. Absolutely. In fact, you just saved me the effort of writing a rather lengthy comment to say exactly the same thing.
To me the price of a book does tell me lots: but nothing about the quality of a book.
It tells me the mindset of who published it, and (sometimes) the length of the work.
What it doesn’t do is tell me what the author or publisher very often is trying to tell me: super cheap does not mean “bargain” and super expensive does not mean “top of the line.”
Both a 99 cent and a 12.99 novel-length ebook are red flags to me that the person who set that price may be out of touch. (They may not be, but there is at least a 50-50 chance that they are.)
If I see a 2.99 novel with mediocre typography I know it’s an indie.
But that doesn’t mean much: it could be anything from a master pro publishing brilliant backlist, to the worst newbie cliche of a clueless wonder who can’t even spell. It means that if nothing else is wrong, and it sounds like a book I’ll like, I might sample.
And that’s something I won’t do for the 12.99 book. If it’s 12.99, and it’s any good, I’ll be able to get it at the library. So it gets no consideration at all.
If the 2.99 book has professional typography, I unconsciously label it as possible bargain — I scrutinize it just the same and will probably only sample anyway, but it’s always good to go in with more positive thoughts.
“People think they like choice, but in reality they don’t, not so much.”
I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it. Perhaps people who aren’t used to having a choice, because they grew up with 3 TV channels and the limited selection of books in their local store, don’t like it so much. People have a tough time changing. They like what they are comfortable with.
Me, I love choice. It’s probably because the internet is a huge part of my family’s life. We have two computers, one for me and one for my husband, but will probably need to get a third soon, because 3 of my kids also use the computer whenever we will let them. We all love the choices that the internet gives us. We don’t even have cable anymore, because what is the point when you have the infinite possibilities the internet offers? TV is too limiting, even with all the latest advances. We don’t mind scrolling through pages and pages of movies or TV shows to find one that sounds appealing. We love having the choice.
Everywhere I hang out on the internet, the message is the same. “Give us more choice! We want options, we want control. You can’t fool us into thinking something is worth $70 just by pricing it at $70!” (That last one is from the MMO I play, when there was a huge community outcry at the price of the latest expansion until the company released enough details to prove to most people’s satisfaction that it would be worth the price.)
Price as an indicator of quality? Ha! Not where I come from. What I see most often is the idea that “You need to show me that this is a quality product, and if you can convince me of that maybe I’ll be pay the price you ask or maybe I’ll pay the price I think the product deserves or maybe I won’t pay at all because you made it too difficult.” This is the trend I see on the internet.
These ideas she’s talking about seem horribly old fashioned and out dated to me. The world is changing and the way people think is being more and more influenced by the internet as more and more people grow up with the internet at their fingertips. I already see it taking shape in my kids who have had access to the internet all their lives.
My daughter can ask a ridiculously obscure question and I can walk over to the computer, type it into google, and give her an answer in 10 seconds. There’s no such thing as not having all the information at your fingertips anymore. And I’m willing to admit that my husband and I get most of our visual entertainment from a website that hosts dubs of anime shows freely. If we have trouble finding what we’re looking for or have trouble with a video loading, we find another website that has it. There’s nothing that isn’t shared somewhere.
Price isn’t the key to selling digitally. Accessibility is.
Yes, the only people who claim that “people don’t like a choice” are those who want to deny people a choice.
The “stress” of the packed supermarket shelves? Really? Then why are even stores with a limited choice paradigm (such as Walmart) increasing choice all the time?
That’s one thing I learned when I made buttons. I had a small selection of buttons which sold well every time, and a larger group which sold steadily but not that well, and a bunch of buttons which hardly sold if ever. But every time I cut the low sellers out of my display, my sales of the best sellers dropped like a rock.
Why? Because people liked reading them. The bigger my display, the longer they browsed, and the more buttons they bought. I truly believe that removing all the best sellers from the list would have less impact than cutting out all the non-sellers. (Because there were fewer of them, and so they had less impact on the overall choice and variety.)
Thank you both for saying what I’m thinking. I quit reading her article the second she started whining about having to make choices. Choices are a god-send to everyone who isn’t a one-size-fits-all cog.
Jamie,
I wasn’t “whining about having to make choices”, what I was saying is that although people think they like choice, the more choice we are faced with, the more stressful the decision. It’s a physiological reality that it stresses people, because our culture (and in the Western world our resources) has evolved much faster than we have. So whilst having a great amount of choice is a wonderful luxury, people do develop coping strategies, to whittle the choices down to something more meaningful and manageable. I didn’t say choice was bad, I said that many people use price as one of the indicators to help them. And that where an author or publisher sets the price of their book is sending a message to that set of people.
There have been studies done that show that more choices offered mean more stress for the chooser.
A lot of people seem to make the leap from “more stress” to “choice is therefore bad.” That’s where I think they err.
More choices may indeed mean more stress – more possibilities to weigh, more comparisons to make, more questions to ask. Which choice will be best for me?
But…so what? Some extra stress in the choosing is well worth it to me, if it gives me the option to choose exactly what I want. Short term stress yielding long term satisfaction. That’s a win.
Not that I agree with the article’s conclusions (or method), but I believe studies have shown that people who choose a product out of many choices are less satisfied with what they chose over those who picked one out of fewer choices (ie the ones who had more choices will have regret etc).
That might not mean people don’t like choice (I’m sure they lean to the store that has more items, though I can’t back this up with anything more than anecdotal information).
Quite honestly, I’ve never heard of a study done on human behavior that I thought sounded valid. They should all be taken with a huge grain of salt, no, with enough salt to kill you. Every time I read about such experiments as are used to draw conclusions about human behavior I can see about a dozen giant problems with the methodology and the logical process used to draw conclusions from them. I just don’t trust “studies” about human behavior.
Taking anything with a grain of salt is wise… especially if it’s fed through the entertainment scope of most articles on said studies (the biggest issue scientists who carry these studies out have, is that they hate being misquoted or when the results of the studies are stretched to make a point the journalist wanted to make). However, if you’re looking at the studies and don’t agree with the methodology that’s a big deal. With most of these you need to take it with a grain of salt because of N. Mainly not enough participants to make any final conclusions (and usually it’s stated as such). But they are indicators and if the methodology is off no one will be able to replicate, and if it’s solid several/many years later people will have replicated it across labs.
I think that some website stuff can be tracked — this is a topic that shows up over on Dreamwidth from time to time. They can tell when users stop navigating through the trees of options, for instance, and thus when they need to reduce options to keep the silent users able to use the service (instead of us squeaky “I want to customize EVERYTHING!” lot).
But that doesn’t necessarily track books so well, and as an ovolacto vegetarian, I know that less choice in food never appeals to me very much — and I am presented with a tiny subset of restaurant menus all the time. It just makes me cranky.
Well, the thing is that more choice is stressful, when you have to make the one RIGHT choice. That’s a very different situation than how people read books
You want to buy a big screen TV? You angst over finding the exact right one, worrying over price and features.
You want to buy a book? It’s just like buttons, if the price is low, there is no choice about it. You browse them for something that looks interesting. You don’t have to choose any at all, or you can choose several.
“Choice is stressful” doesn’t mean that having a choice is stressful in the least. It means “having to make a choice” is stressful.
The advice in that article is utterly wrong. Let’s start from the bottom up. She ends the article with this:
Well, there so many examples in the software business, I’ll only point out a few very significant ones. We can start with open source software companies (e.g. Red Hat). They don’t just give away their products, they give away the blueprints for making their products. It’s not just OSS either. Has anyone ever heard of Angry Birds? That is a high quality product with an incredibly low price point. In the digital world, high prices do not equal quality.
As for the rest of her questions, Fuller’s ESB; whatever my wife buys; I watch movies I expect to enjoy; I wouldn’t, I gave my wife a pasta maker for Christmas; and whether or not the publisher wants me to buy the ebook version.
The first four answers should be self-explanatory. Any ebook priced over $9.99 means the publisher wants me to buy a dead tree version. Think about that for minute and it should make sense.
I agree, and if I really want to read the book, I buy a used copy for even cheaper and have the satisfaction of knowing that the publisher didn’t get any money from me. Though I do feel bad about the author not getting any money
I go the used-copy route, also, Diane, with the same purpose. It usually doesn’t bother me about the author not getting money from the sale, though. That author made the choice to go trad pub when they could be indie instead and have kept the price low enough that I’d buy new from them instead.
JEH
…’people dont like choice.’ I have to say, sounds like writer is thinking of many adults in the 1950s. I think one needs to get out more. Most whom I come in touch with have WILDLY different interests. The internet and the fall of newspapers and book reviews, has taken many many out of chains. I’d hate to think the nations across the world are conformity slaves. I think that is only the hypervision of dictators. Just my .02
While most of us familiar with the indie market understand that a lot of great books are low priced, most of the masses who just want to read will indeed make the leap in logic described. I wish that weren’t true, but it is for most folks.
It’s hard to find the sweet spot between what someone will pay and what someone will assume is garbage. That’s one of the things that makes this business challenging.
While most of us familiar with the indie market understand that a lot of great books are low priced, most of the masses who just want to read will indeed make the leap in logic described.
Will they? Or will they say, ‘I’m on a budget; I can buy this book and this book and this book, OR I can just buy that one book over there, which looks interesting, but no more so than any one of these three?’
Which attitude they adopt depends to a very great extent, I find, on how much surplus cash they have floating around. These days ‘the masses’ are not, as a rule, stagnant with the stuff.
Why, just this morning I went online looking for a good introductory ebook on WordPress. I looked at several, all by either authors I’d heard of or reputable technical publishers, and then — I bought the cheapest. I wasn’t going to pay $20 or even $10 for that book when I could get one that did the same job for $2.99.
By the way, when I’m buying fizzy drinks, I do indeed buy ‘whatever is cheapest’ — save for one or two off-brands that I know by experience taste downright disgusting to me.
When it comes to books, most won’t say, “I can buy these three books instead of this one over here.” Instead, they’ll say, “Well, I guess I won’t be buying any books this year.” I’m sure some folks will buy the cheapest stuff, but some folks will buy Boone’s Farm too.
No one is saying to price our work out of the range of folks and hope that they’ll be drawn to our genius. What they’re saying is that a lot, not all, but a lot, of folks will avoid the cheapest bargain basement products based on the perception that it’s cheap in content as well. I wish that wasn’t the case, but it is. The reader is parting with more than just his or her money, but the person will be parting with the time it takes to read it as well, and the perception that the content is too cheap for them will affect whether or not it’s worth said time.
You can still come in at prices people will pay without going to the Dom Perignon standard. However, it requires sound analysis on what that point is, which means market research beyond, “Eh, I’m pretty sure this is good. After all, everyone likes cheap stuff.”
When it comes to books, most won’t say, “I can buy these three books instead of this one over here.” Instead, they’ll say, “Well, I guess I won’t be buying any books this year.”
You’re assuming that people who are recreational readers would rather read no books at all than read cheap books. That isn’t true in my experience. Nor in the experience of the mass-market paperback industry, which was built on the fact that millions of readers would rather have three cheap books than one expensive one.
Yes. Exactly!
(R.D.)
Actually, the real problem with this article (and articles like this) is just saying ANYTHING that begins with “people like” or “people don’t like” or “people do this” or “people don’t do this”. My god, don’t you realize you’re talking about 6 billion individuals? There’s no such thing as something that ALL people like or don’t like or do or don’t do (other than breathe and eat and drink). Attempting to make such a sweeping generalization is sheer arrogance.
I don’t know if I buy the idea that price is a measure of quality for books specifically, the reason being that the “quality” of a book is subjective. What I consider a great book, somebody else probably thinks is trash, and vice versa.
But there is some psychological truth there. I tend to avoid free books, thinking they probably aren’t any good, whereas I’ll jump at a book that looks like something I’d enjoy if it’s normally priced at $8 and it’s suddenly on sale for $2. I value my time at least as much as I value my money, and don’t want to waste it on a bad book (even on sample pages).
And some books are absolutely worth their high price points. Jared Diamond has a new book out. On Amazon, the hardcover is $21 and the ebook $20. I will not balk at that price. I expect that book to be worth every penny. I would be disappointed if I saw it priced lower.
The only “truth” is that SOME people think that way.
Paying $20 for an ebook? Unthinkable! No matter who the author is. My husband won’t even pay the $15 being asked for the latest Harry Dresden ebook and it’s one of his all time favorite series. He sent a sternly worded letter to Penguin when he saw that price on Amazon. He said he’d just get the print version from the library. (Note: if the price had been reasonable, less than $10 let’s say, he would have snapped it up. Instead, Penguin lost a sale. Not just an ebook sale, but an entire sale.)
Sarah,
That is exactly what Penguin wants. I am not being critical of your husband, he is making a rational choice. Penguin wants to lose ebook sales and is willing to lose a few paper sales to protect its position.
Claire is right when it comes to marketing products like toothpaste or perfumes, but not about books. Author brand is the most important, but there are hundreds of thousands of authors out there (dead or alive) and each has a different brand; some household, some known only to our spouses and mothers, like my brand. It’s like having hundreds of thousands of toothpaste labels. How are you going to sell your toothpaste/book? A book is not utilitarian like toothpaste, and the higher price will not improve your appeal like expensive perfumes. Also, you sell a book only once to a customer not over and over like a tube of toothpaste.
So how do you increase your author brand? Dean Wesley Smith says write lots of books. He’s right. Joe Konrath says “eyeballs,” how many people saw your name or book? He’s right. Short of a lot of publicity obtained freely or through money, eyeballs are the only answer. Either stick with it by writing a lot of books or give your books away for free.
Not for free!
What is better, your book priced expensively and no sales, or thousands of books free or low priced in the hands of thousands of readers? In my opinion this is a no brainer.
The discussion of choice is missing some important factors. The amount of effort involved to make the choice is critical. We humans have a limited attention span. We cannot do a full cost-benefit analysis on every decision we make, no matter what the economists believe. Another factor is the importance of the decision to the individual. Choosing a mate will get more think-time that choosing what clothes to wear (and the first often drives the second). Our belief in our ability to improve the decision by gathering more information will also impact our willingness to spend time on it. Finally, the cost of decision-making will matter as well. The cheaper (in time, money, or stress) a decision is, the more likely we are to pursue it.
All of these factors will be different for every individual who buys books. We should be very careful about generalizing.