Tell Me Something Tuesday #29

Welcome to my weekly meme Tell Me Something Tuesday where I ask you something and you tell me the answer!! It’s as simple as that and I thought it would be a great way for all of us bloggers to get to know one another! So this is how it works: I post a question here on my blog and then i give my answer. I invite all the bloggers to take the question and post it on their blog with their answer and we can hop around and see what everyone says! If you are a blogger don’t forget to leave your link at the bottom of this post! If you aren’t a blogger – that’s okay too!! Leave your answer in the comments section!

 

 Tell Me Something:

What do you think Ebooks should be priced at? How much is too much and what is fair?

My answer:

I have some opinions about this… as usual. LOL.

So let me just get right to it.

I think 9.99 or 10.99 for an Ebook is completely ridiculous. Ebooks don’t cost hardly anything to produce (except of course for the writers hard work) so why charge so much?

Now I personally have only seen the Major publishing houses charge this much for an ebook and I think it’s wrong.  I think the great thing about an Ebook is that they are affordable – especially for this economy when jobs are low, money is tight and people are being cautious about how much they spend on things they don’t absolutely need. Why not give people a break and charge less than 5$ for something that they will enjoy?

That being said I think 4.99 and below for an Ebook is a good price. Right now my two novels are priced at 2.99 and I think that’s reasonable considering when Masquerade came out I was a brand new author. No one would gamble 10$ on me when they had no clue if my books were good or not. I as a reader won’t do it either. I have seen many authors price their first book at 2.99 then increase the rest of the series to 3.99 or 4.99 and I think that’s a good strategy too because if you liked the first book you know that you will most likely get the same quality so paying a few dollars more isn’t as big of an issue.

Now… back to the 10$ ebooks. I can’t say that I have never spent that because I have (example: Cynthia Hand’s Unearthy and Hallowed) but I waited a long time to buy Unearthly even though I really wanted it. Why? Because when it first came out it was in Hardback only. No ebook. No paperback. It was 18$ at BN and it was her first book. I refused to pay that for a brand new author. When the Ebook came out at 9.99$ I paid it. I loved the book thankfully so that’s why I paid the same for Hallowed.

But recently I bought another book for 10.99$ as an ebook (forgive me I can’t think of the title right now, it was a werewolf book and I posted a review here on Werewolf Wednesday) and I disliked the book. I was so upset I paid 10.99$ for a book that wasn’t good at all. I felt ripped off.

I haven’t bought a high priced ebook since.

Another thing that gets me about high priced ebooks is that now you can go on amazon and usually get a hardback book for 11$ or so. Why would I buy a 10$ ebook when I could get the hardback for the same price? I wouldn’t.

Case and point: Hemlock. I seriously wanna read this. The Ebook is 9.99$ (hence the reason I haven’t read it yet) and I looked on amazon.. I can get the HB for 11$ and some change. I’ll probably get the HB (if I can’t find it at a library) so I can give the book away to friends to read.

So anyway, that’s my long winded answer about Ebook pricing.

What do you think?

 

Before you go grab next week’s question:

I’m going to ask a about a touchy subject… bear with me:

What do you think of the whole Indie vs. Traditional Publishing? Do you as a reader (and blogger!) look at the publisher name before you choose to buy or read a book?

 

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