Ebook Pricing

[ysabetwordsmith]

Here's a new idea in ebook pricing: pay as you go.  (Link courtesy of my partner Doug.)  I think it's an improvement over paying full-price up front.  

However, I don't think it will be as effective as offering free samples.  If you've written a whole book, posting the first chapter free makes sense: if you haven't hooked readers by then, face it, you were never going to get their money anyhow.  Short first chapter?  Make it the first three.  

Comments

[siliconshaman]

Why do I have the feeling that if this gets adopted by mainstream publishers it's going to work out more expensive if you read through to the end...
Although, I think it might have some unintended consequences. For example, if it becomes a more common model there would be an incentive to write longer books, but ones that grab the reader in the first 50 pages or so.

[davv]

I think I'd prefer a model that manages to somehow work even in the absence of copyright. At least the kind of copyright we have now (life plus seventy years? Or Mickey Mouse until now + time enough to get another extension passed) is way out of whack.

Such models could include usual up-front crowdfunding (possibly with advance copies so you get an instrumental benefit to supporting), donation, or the street performer protocol (basically: pay me and I'll release the next chapter).

Maybe the latter's like what you're saying here. It is certainly a form of pay-as-you-go. Of course there would be a game-theoretical incentive to freeload (not pay, wait for others to pay, then just read as the chapters come), but freeloaders run the risk of the payment not reaching the threshold at all. And then there's the little fact that people often don't act according to game-theoretical models anyway.

One should also be careful not to make the transaction too fine-grained. Per chapter is probably okay. Per page can get a little hairier. There's a transaction cost - the amount of work you have to do to think about whether it's worth it to pay for the next little part - and the presence of transaction costs have been used to argue why micropayment is not more used than it is today.

[nonny]

First 3 chapters as a teaser is standard from what I have seen for e-books. :) What some self-pub authors I know are doing also is offering the first book as perma-free... although that only really works well for series books, and only if you have multiple out. I'm looking to explore the whole self-pub route soon-ish so we shall see...

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I'm learning that it's often worth my while to release a poem that looks like it would make a good series.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I'm not a big fan of pay as you go, since it means another periodic thing I have to go do to read the story and in addition I have to pay money for each bit. And decide, over and over and over again, whether to pay for the next bit. I hate deciding.

...there's really no upside. I've seen a couple authors try it and it made me not buy their book. :/ Maybe I'll get it if they finish it and release it in one piece, although the total cost of all the chapters is pretty pricey at that point.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Sounds like they never heard of Crowd-Funding!

I think the key would be, how 'painless' is each tiny payment. We can run up a lot of connect time in various places (eg cell phone per minute charges) because it's passive and painless, it's automatically added to a monthly bill.

If just passively reading along is all it takes, then as long as the book is interesting enough to keep you from opting out, the author is earning her payment.

The only idea over at http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130204/10563521877/next-ebook-evolution%20-pay-as-you-re%20ad-ebooks.shtml which fits this model is the 'put up a chunk of money in advance to buy whatever time/pages you wander through', like a pre-paid cell phone account. That would operate painlessly, but it would need to start out with a lot of obviously desirable material or perks to get me, for instance, to put up the chunk.

Hm, there could also be a factor like, "This book needs to earn $X a month. If you are the only reader, each page will deduct 10-cents from your account. But if there are 10 readers, each page will only cost each of you 1-cent. If you can recruit 100 readers, each page will cost each of you .001-cent. The more you publicize the book, the cheaper it will get!"

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

I prefer the free sample model. If you read my first chapter and want the rest, buy the book. Don't parcel out my payment in dribs and rabs. I get enough of that already.

I am not a fan of the seriel model (I don't even like it for TV shows).

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>I prefer the free sample model. If you read my first chapter and want the rest, buy the book. Don't parcel out my payment in dribs and rabs. I get enough of that already.<<

Point, if the payments are cut down too small. I'm okay with little chunks though. It depends on how big the original price is. Most of my smaller stuff is sold in one piece; it's the expensive epics that tend to get microfunded.

>>I am not a fan of the seriel model (I don't even like it for TV shows).<<

That's a matter of taste and structure. Some people just don't like serials, which is fine. Others love them. For me, it varies. I think the approach fits for certain types of story, not necessarily all stories. I'm really enjoying "The Case of the Counterfeit Enchantments."

[rowyn.livejournal.com]

That'd be an interesting model for selling some other products, like video games.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Or something like Tarot or Iching readings, which I made very good money on for a coupld of months in the 1980s. I wrote a version of the classic Tarot deck and a simple program to let the viewer keep drawing cards till they added up to an answer for her. This was used as a feature in a sort of proto-internet big business-to-business network thing, to entertain secretaries while they were waiting for their real stuff to upload or download or whatever. The employers were billed for the whole month's usage of the big service. I and other feature providers got royalties according to how many minutes of our feature were used.

The actual users -- the secretaries -- weren't pestered for payments, they just kept drawing cards as long as they liked, and the software kept the record of how long they'd been connected.

Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

I can think of a place where that model would really work: waiting rooms.

Re: Hmm...

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

And the longer they have to wait, the more it costs the doctor (or whoever)!

Re: Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Heh, yeah. A nice incentive for competent scheduling.