Category Archives: Kindle Prices

One of the Best Readers’ LifeHacks Ever?


If eBook Bestseller Prices Are So High, Why Did BookGorilla Readers Get 91 of the Year’s Top 100 Bestsellers at an Average Price of $2.92?

comparison, Features, Kindle Prices, News

by Steve Windwalker – October 13, 2015

Source: BookGorilla’s Annual Analysis of Top 100 Kindle Bestseller Prices

Okay, it’s multiple choice time. Two statements. Please pick one that’s true:

  1. Traditional publishers’ bestseller prices are rising to ridiculous levels, with an average original price of $11.22 for the Top 100 bestsellers in the Kindle store for the calendar year 2014.
  2. Traditional publishers are offering over 90% of their top Kindle bestsellers at huge, BookGorilla-worthy discounts, so that, to date, 91 of those Top 100 bestsellers for 2014 have been featured on BookGorilla, at an average price of $2.92.

The answer? Both statements are true.

More that any time since the 2007 launch of the Kindle, the big publishers are taking advantage of discounting incentives offered by Amazon to ensure that nearly every bestseller, and most other books as well, are offered at some point at the kind of low sub-$4 prices that ebook readers have come to love.

The vast majority of the time, let’s be clear, the prices for those same books are much higher.

Equally clear, there is a large swath of readers who are the readers’ equivalent of early adopters. They are eager, one could even say impatient, to buy bestsellers and their favorite authors’ other books when they first come out. They pay mightily to be part of this “be the first on your block” club; if they had purchased all of the Top 100 Kindle bestsellers of 2014 at their original prices, they would have spent $1,121.55. But pay they do, obviously. Otherwise  — and here’s this week’s tautology — those Top 100 Kindle bestsellers would not have been on the list.

But by putting nearly all of their most popular books on deep discounts averaging about 73% for short periods of time, usually ranging from one day to a month, the traditional publishers have made bargain-hunting an extremely beneficial exercise for a different group of readers: those who balance their love for bestsellers and other quality selections with very conscious price sensitivity.

By waiting for the right moment and pouncing when these books are at their best prices ever, an especially voracious price-sensitive reader could have purchased  the 91 bestsellers featured by BookGorilla for just $265.60. That’s a savings of $731.04 over the $996.44 original cost of these 91 titles. (Some of the other nine books were never offered at a serious discount; some others didn’t make it through BookGorilla’s curating process, in spite of their bestseller status.)

But there’s a catch, of course. Anyone could find those savings on the day they pop up, but you’d have to be looking … and looking … and looking. It would take so much time that there would be little or no time for reading. BookGorilla’s purpose is to find and recognize the best bargains and serve them up to our hundreds of thousands of followers each morning based on subscribers’ selected preferences.

No other ebook bargain alert service has delivered even half of these Top 100 bestseller deals to its subscribers over the past two years, which is why we humbly submit that, along with the Kindle itself, BookGorilla is the one of the greatest lifehacks ever for avid readers. (We also include recommendations for curated 5-star discoveries by indie authors and small or new-media presses, but in stark contrast to other ebook bargain alert services, fewer than 15% of the titles we recommend are ad-supported.)

Who are these price-sensitive readers? Well, we’re not going to give up their names or email addresses, but we’re happy to share some results from our latest BookGorilla 3-Minute Survey on “What Makes an Attractive eBook Bargain?”

We asked the 2,180 readers who have responded during the past week to select the statement that best approximates their approach to this question:

“How important are bargain prices in your decisions about which ebooks to buy?”

Here’s how they responded:

  1. I often pay full retail prices of $9.99 or above, but I also like to find bargain prices on books that I know I want to read.  136 responses – 6.24%
  2. Finding bargain prices is essential to my effort to stay on a budget, and I rarely pay full retail prices of $9.99 or above.  654 responses – 30.03%
  3. I almost never pay more than $2.99 for an ebook purchase.  740 responses – 33.98%
  4. I rarely download any ebook that is not free.  477 responses – 21.90%
  5. None of the above.  171 responses – 7.85%

These survey respondents don’t constitute all readers, of course. But they’re our readers, and it’s our mission to make them happy.  We wouldn’t want it any other way!

Coming in our next column: Okay, so price-sensitive readers get great deals, and everybody else seems willing to pay through the roof? Is it really such a win-win situation? We’ll take a closer look at why those $12 to $15 “regular” prices are unsustainable for even the largest publishers.

 

Kindle Store eBook Prices Are Rising … Or Are They?

Kindle Prices, News

by Steve Windwalker

October 5, 2015

There has been a steady drumbeat of complaints lately that Kindle Store prices are going up, up and away now that several major publishers have written “agency model pricing” into their latest ebook contracts with Amazon.

Is it really the case? Well, yes and no.

First, let’s take a look at a positively eerie case of the ebook price planets being in alignment. The chart below shows a price breakdown of the Top 100 bestsellers in the Kindle store. You can see that 27% of the Top 100 were priced under $3;  55% were priced between $3 and $9.99; and 18% were priced at $10 and up:

Screen Shot 2015-10-05 at 4.25.46 PM

Swell, you say, but when was this? And it’s the answer to that question that’s kind of amazing, because the above chart is an exact reflection of the price breakdown on Kindle bestsellers for three very different date ranges:

  • a snapshot of the Top 100 bestsellers on January 18, 2013;
  • a snapshot of the Top 100 bestsellers this past weekend, on October 4, 2015; and
  • Amazon’s calendar year list of the Top 100 bestsellers cumulatively from January 1, 2015 through October 4, 2015.

How can this possibly be? Well, we all know that figures lie and liars figure, so let’s put aside the YTD figures for now and take a closer look at the two single-day snapshots, using this comparative analysis from BookGorilla. Inside those aggregate figures, there are some fascinating trends:

  • There have been significant increases at both extremes of the pricing spectrum. On the low end, the number of 99-cent bestsellers increased from 15% to 24%. At the high end, the number of bestsellers priced at $13 and up has increased from 5% to 14%.
  • The clearest indication that the big publishers are raising their prices precipitously comes when one compares that increase at $13 and up with a dramatic change over the same period in the number of bestsellers priced from $9.99 to $12.99. 22% of the Top 100 bestsellers were in that price range back in January 2013, but only 6% fell in that range this weekend. Most eye-popping is the fact that, as of October 4, 2015, none of the books in the Top 100 bestsellers were priced at $9.99, which not so long ago was Amazon’s preferred price for bestsellers and new releases on Kindle.

One might conclude, therefore, that with the latest round of big publisher contracts, the publishers have soundly defeated Amazon.

But one would be wrong.

That’s where our most significant statistical comparison comes in:

In our January 2013 analysis, 58% of the Top 50 bestsellers were published by the big traditional publishers, and that figure has since declined to 38%. Conversely, 42% of the Top 50 bestsellers were published by indie authors or by Amazon’s own publishing imprints in January 2013, compared with 62% this past weekend.

In other words, what the big publishers have won in their latest round of contract “victories” over Amazon is the right to price themselves right off the bestseller list.  

And just in case you think that all of the least expensive books are self-published dreck, we’ll get into that in greater detail in the future, but the somewhat tautological truth is that these bestselling non-traditional titles are very popular, well-written books by authors with huge followings, including many who have left traditional publishers to go indie and others who have signed contracts and hit the bestseller lists with Amazon’s ever-expanding group of successful publishing imprints.

We’ll look further into the consequences of these trends for readers, authors, and publishers in future posts, and also look more closely at the meaning of the discrepancy between the snapshot sales rankings and the calendar year bestsellers. But let’s stop there for now and remember that bargains, like beauty, are often in the eye of the beholder.

With that in mind, we would love it if you would take 3 minutes to answer 3 questions about what constitutes a bargain in today’s ebook market, the importance of bargains, and how you find your best ebook buys.

Please? It will really help us drill down on how we can best serve you at BookGorilla. And thanks in advance!

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