Why I've switched to "Reader Sets Price" on Smashwords.
My first novel, Ragnarok Conspiracy was made available in preliminary version some weeks to some ago on different channels in a version that has my novelettes Orussian Quarantine and Atheist Afterlife as bonus stories. Other than my novelettes, the novel, due to financial considerations was edited by attracting beta-readers only instead of me hiring a professional editor.
As I made some money by publishing chapters on the steemit platform, and as writing for me is a hobby, not a career move, I'm not actually looking to make any real money from the book, so I considered making the book free of charge on all platforms.
Unfortunately, trying to make the book free creates problems. Amazon claims to do price matching, but in reality, it doesn't price match free books down to zero and there is no way to make a book free of charge without making it Amazon exclusive. Play does allow making the book free of charge, and so does Smashwords, but the later has a few caveats with doing so. Some of the channels that Smashwords pushes to will not accept books that are set to free.
Smashwords has a great option though. You can set the price of a book to "Reader sets price", and still set a price for retailers. The result is that anyone who wants to can now fetch a free copy from Smashwords, or if they want to, pay a small amount of money for my work. People who don't want to go through the trouble of using a USB cable to get the book onto their e-reader can still get my book from Amazon, Play, iBooks, Kobo, Scribd, Bol or B&N.
On Amazon, I've set the price for all of the countries Amazon allows it for to the lowest admissible price for the 70% royalties. This means that readers in for example Brazil or India pay a much lower price for my book than people in the EU or UK.
For Play, I'm taking a different approach. While I can set the prize on Play to FREE, I've discovered that I reach many more readers by periodically do a 90% off promotion than when I make it free or when I set it to a minimum price all of the time. So now until August 31st, the book is 90% off on Play. In a few months, I'll do a black Friday promotion.
It would be cool if I could reach the maximum number of readers by making my book free on all platforms, but it has become clear to me that this just isn't practical. Having to have different strategies for different platforms is a bit of a hassle, but I think, in the end, it makes sense from an exposure perspective.
As I made some money by publishing chapters on the steemit platform, and as writing for me is a hobby, not a career move, I'm not actually looking to make any real money from the book, so I considered making the book free of charge on all platforms.
Unfortunately, trying to make the book free creates problems. Amazon claims to do price matching, but in reality, it doesn't price match free books down to zero and there is no way to make a book free of charge without making it Amazon exclusive. Play does allow making the book free of charge, and so does Smashwords, but the later has a few caveats with doing so. Some of the channels that Smashwords pushes to will not accept books that are set to free.
Smashwords has a great option though. You can set the price of a book to "Reader sets price", and still set a price for retailers. The result is that anyone who wants to can now fetch a free copy from Smashwords, or if they want to, pay a small amount of money for my work. People who don't want to go through the trouble of using a USB cable to get the book onto their e-reader can still get my book from Amazon, Play, iBooks, Kobo, Scribd, Bol or B&N.
On Amazon, I've set the price for all of the countries Amazon allows it for to the lowest admissible price for the 70% royalties. This means that readers in for example Brazil or India pay a much lower price for my book than people in the EU or UK.
For Play, I'm taking a different approach. While I can set the prize on Play to FREE, I've discovered that I reach many more readers by periodically do a 90% off promotion than when I make it free or when I set it to a minimum price all of the time. So now until August 31st, the book is 90% off on Play. In a few months, I'll do a black Friday promotion.
It would be cool if I could reach the maximum number of readers by making my book free on all platforms, but it has become clear to me that this just isn't practical. Having to have different strategies for different platforms is a bit of a hassle, but I think, in the end, it makes sense from an exposure perspective.
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