A New Price on Forsaken By Shadow

After a lot of careful thought and consideration, weighing of pros and cons, I have opted to raise the price of Forsaken By Shadow to $1.99.  It’s not a huge increase.  It doesn’t put me up into Amazon’s 70% royalty range.  $1.99 is the absolute most I am willing to charge for a novella.  It’s not a full novel, so I don’t think I should be charging a full novel price.  But there is a certain group who won’t take you seriously at $0.99 or $1.00, so I’d like to play around a bit with my price point to see how it affects sales.  Zoe recently raised prices on her second and third novellas to this point and hasn’t seen much change in the numbers indicating a decline.  I figure it’s worth a shot.  The thing is, $1.00 doesn’t give me any wiggle room in terms of offering coupon incentives at Smashwords or any other promo discounts.  It’s either $0.99 or free there.

Chances are, I will drop the price again to $1.00 or $0.99 when Edge of Shadow releases later this year in an effort to pull in new readers again with the lure of the cheaper first in the series.  And I will, probably, be doing promotional stuff with coupons to drive more traffic to Smashwords.  But for now, if you want to take advantage of the low low price of $1 to give Forsaken By Shadow a try, go buy now.  Update: For once the system updated fast, so the $1.99 price is already in effect.  If you’d still like it for $1, here’s a 50% off coupon for Smashwords, good through Sunday the 25th: CQ29N.  By the end of the week, I expect several of my distributors will have updated to the new, higher price. Well, except for Sony or Barnes and Noble, which take forever to update.

I have also decided to opt-out of distribution to Barnes and Noble from Smashwords.  I am not categorized correctly, listed only as “ebooks” and not under any sort of sub category, so for the most part, I am not being found.  Additionally, Pub It is supposed to go live at the end of the summer, and I have every intention of going directly through them and (I hope) having more control over my listing.  I don’t want two listings at Barnes and Noble.

Forsaken By Shadow is available Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, Sony, Scribd, and the iBookstore.

Recipe of the day: Sausage and Squash Casserole

8 thoughts on “A New Price on Forsaken By Shadow

  1. I’ve actually thought about going up on Smashwords, but not on Amazon. Ty Johnston told me that he does better with his books on Amazon when they’re cheaper, but on Smashwords when they are more expensive. I think this is because there are more author readers on Smashwords and they think .99 or 1.00 cheapens the work. On Amazon, you get a lot of people looking for a bargain. Sometimes it’s really hard to decide what to do. I had a hard time selling my two novels at 1.99 (the novellas have always been less expensive), and when I changed them to .99, they started selling. On Smashwords, I’ve sold hardly anything regardless of the price. Keep us posted on how the change affects (or doesn’t affect) your sales.

    1. Yeah I typically don’t have huge sales on Smashwords. Like 20 something overall out of nearly 1,000 copies sold. No idea what kind of numbers I’m getting from the premium distribution since the quarterly reports aren’t in yet.

  2. I’ve only sold 4 out of almost 1400 overall. LOL. As far as premium distribution, they have B & N reports through March now, but I didn’t have anything on there until after that. So who knows? I have no idea of the time frame on reports from other channels. I’m really depending on Amazon right now.

    1. Yeah FBS didn’t even get to B and N until May I don’t think. I don’t expect any kind of impressive numbers. I’m really eager for PubIt! to launch because I think it has the potential to start to rival Amazon and be a good place for sales IF we’re finally able to get our work categorized correctly and if they offer the same kind of control over the product that Amazon does with the Digital Text Platform. I’m not sure how long it will take for the copy of FBS on BN to come down now that I’ve opted out. Probably NOT before PubIt! goes live, but I kind of want to start over with BN through PubIt!, you know? Have a fresh listing that is properly categorized and found by the RIGHT FLIPPING AUDIENCE. Am still annoyed about that.

      1. I’m not in the category I should be in either. And B & N is slow reporting sales to FB. I may leave my books on B & N until I see when PubIt is going to be available. Maybe we can see real time figures like on Amazon. It’s going to be interesting to see how that goes.

        1. PubIt is supposed to go live at the end of the summer and given that it takes 8 weeks from “shipment” to B and N to update, I figure even though I have opted out now, it’ll be that long or longer until the Smashwords version is down.

    1. The trick is gonna be staying patient enough to give the price point a good run to determine if sales are slacking because of IT or because of some other factor.

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