Re-Thinking the .99 cent eBook

I used to side with the folks who thought a .99-cent eBook was a bad idea. I used to think we as writers were selling out, selling our hard work short and giving it away. But over the past few months I've slowly started changing my tune.

When I first released The Sweet Sixteenth back in April, I wanted to put it for sale for .99-cents, but after a conversation with a real published author, I decided against it. I learned that real authors were basically pissed off at the .99-cent eBook by independent authors because they were hurting their own sales and dragging down the level of pricing for eBooks in general. I saw that opinion echoed in several websites so I decided against making my book a .99-cent choice.

Now here were are only a few months later, and some of those very authors who were against it, are now doing it. I don't know what happened exactly, maybe it was the old "If I can't beat them join them" reason, I don't know.

I do agree that perhaps you should not debut an eBook at .99-cents, because then you leave no room to drop the price later. My plan was to drop the price of my first book, when my second eBook was out, which should be soon. But I've decided to drop the price right now, for several reasons, not the least of which is that the facts show that .99-cent eBook outsell their $2.99 counterparts by a score of 2-to-1. You make less per book, but you sell more books at the lower prices so it's something each author has to decide with each book.

The other reason is that so many authors are doing it, there is no point in taking some sort of stand anymore, to preserve some level of expected compensation for intellectual property. It is what it is, we are in a crazy time with these eBooks and the learning curves are very fluid and twisting all over the place. Everyone is making up their own rules as they go along and there is nothing wrong with that. And since no one is following any of the traditional rules, or even most of the new ones we are making up as we go along, I guess we can just pretty much do what we want and hope for the best. So in a sense, the only rule... there are no rules.