One of these days indies need to unite and form their own sales platform.
The only problem is it needs to be started by a collective of prominent authors with credibility and a huge fan base if it stands any chance of working.

Otherwise we're going to keep fighting an uphill battle with trads and book platforms.

I saw a sharp increase in returns this year after I started using Amazon ads. I'm such a prawn, I had no visibility before that. I had to pause the ads on the romances (the only genre this was happening to). I couldn't afford to be seen! I'm really pleased about this and it's great that they acknowledged indie authors as the ones who brought it to their attention.
 

Amazon hasn't made a date public yet, right? Maybe it wants to give the chiselers one last grace period. Jerks.

I know Amazon regards books as just another commodity to sell.  But a book isn't like a pair of socks returnable w/minimal reason why.  Good socks may make me feel warm, cozy and right w/the world but books offer dreams and understanding of other human beings.  Amazon should limit its returns program for ebooks/ppbk/audio only for those poorly manufactured.
   

Quote from: LilyBLily on September 23, 2022, 11:41:40 PM

Someone so cheap they'd return a 99-cent book is never going to be my ideal reader.

Pardon, but no indie book ought to be priced at 99 cents.  We should stop underpricing to stop buyers undervaluing indie books.  I'd stick a "5" or a "10" in front of that ".99."

It was a BookBub sale. My women's fiction titles are regularly priced at $6.99, which has been dead center between how indies tend to price in the subgenre (too low, IMO) and how trad pubs do. Maybe I should raise the prices to $7.99, since I recently saw a trad pub women's fiction novel priced at $14.99 for the ebook. Most of my other ebooks are at $3.99 and $4.99.

The point of pricing at 99 cents temporarily is to find new fans and get them over the hump of paying something like real money to try an author new to them. I think it's a valid strategy. I've only done free very rarely and only for books in KU where I'd hope to make the cost back in page reads. My most recent experiment with doing that in western romance has actually paid off. Lots of read-through to the other books in the series.

When I was a regular Amazon ads user, the first book in the western series was priced a dollar less than the others, but not discounted as such. The cost of the ads, though, certainly cut out any profit on sales of that title. The ads were only justified because the first book sold the series. If you think about it, running ads so expensive there is no hope of a profit and setting a book to free and buying ads to tell people about it are simply two sides of the same coin.

 

I know Amazon regards books as just another commodity to sell.  But a book isn't like a pair of socks returnable w/minimal reason why.  Good socks may make me feel warm, cozy and right w/the world but books offer dreams and understanding of other human beings.  Amazon should limit its returns program for ebooks/ppbk/audio only for those poorly manufactured.
   

Someone so cheap they'd return a 99-cent book is never going to be my ideal reader.

Pardon, but no indie book ought to be priced at 99 cents.  We should stop underpricing to stop buyers undervaluing indie books.  I'd stick a "5" or a "10" in front of that ".99."