99 Cents

My 99-cent sale of To Glory Arise ended a few days ago, and was a success.  It reached #21 on Barnes & Noble, and #52 on Amazon . . . though, as is normal with these kind of promotions, it retained those numbers for less than a day.  Because action-adventure sells better than SF, To Glory Arise sold better than any of my science fiction, though not as well as The Rift, which is my biggest seller and still going strong.

But though the numbers were good (for my work, anyway), the follow-through was problematical.  The sales for the rest of the series jumped a bit, but not brilliantly.  In fact it seems that less than 1% of those who bought the sale book bothered to buy any others in the series.  These numbers seem on the money for the rest of my sales.

What this tells me is that there is a very large audience who will buy ebooks if they cost 99 cents or less, but will not buy books at the regular price (which in my case is $4.99, hardly enough to break anyone’s bank).  And that tells me that the readers’ only conditions for purchase is that it be in the right category, and very cheap or free.

Now I don’t know how many of the sale books were actually read.  I’ve been known to pick up books at a sale and not read them for years, if ever.  (For that matter, I’ve been known not to read a book I bought at full price.)  And I suspect that books bought at 99 cents aren’t particularly valued by the purchasers, and may just be tucked away for a rainy day.  Or collected, perhaps by people who just want to own the maximum number of ebooks and don’t necessarily want to read them.

On the other hand, the purchasers may be people who just devour ebooks, one after another, like popcorn, and not care so much whether they’re actually any good.  

Does anyone know any of these people?  Because if I figured out who they are and what they want, maybe I could shamelessly flatter them into buying more of my books, maybe at the regular price where I can actually make a living.

Or not.  Still, I find it worth noting that there’s this whole category of reader that didn’t exist before, created entirely by online discounting.  Their reading experience must be very different from anything that existed prior to ebooks, reading massively but choosing the books without any criteria but price.  After all, books in every category go on sale every day for 99 cents or less— and some self-published authors price their books at 99 cents from the git-go— so if you don’t want to pay more for your reading material, you won’t have to.

I wonder if these readers insist on a radical discount for any of their other purchases.  Do they buy only day-old bread?  Do they shop exclusively at used-clothing stores?  Do they buy the cheapest, smallest pre-owned cars?

I’m guessing they don’t.

But of course we should be grateful that they read at all.  And I am beyond grateful that they choose to read me, in however deeply discounted a condition.

I’ll be planning my next sale soon.