Markdowns Don't Work, Either

It's true that readers are wary of buying an unknown author's book, and that's one of the reasons experts give for encouraging a price discount or, better yet, offering your book for free.

Despite the explosion of indie books in recent years, they haven't caught on as much as many people claim. Indie books can compete with trade published ones in the looks department--side by side on Amazon's page, it's often difficult to distinguish between a novel that was self-published and one that has a $5,000 cover design. The thing is, though, they're not side by side on the page. We indies can't pay for placement, and even if we could afford to, that's not something Amazon offers (yet--they probably will at some point, just to rake in more money from saps like us). 

According to Jane Friedman, "...the Big Five publishers have a huge advantage—their sales teams pitch books for placement at bookstore accounts, big-box stores, specialty retailers, and so on. It’s part of their job to get the biggest sales commitment possible in advance of publication." 

So, The Big Five don't technically pay for placement, but if Amazon has committed to buying a large quantity of a particular book, of course they'll position it prominently on the site. They've gotta earn that money back.

So, what does an indie publisher do to get people to notice their book? Unless he/she manages to sell 10,000 copies of their book in a couple of days, it's going to be buried somewhere on screen number 2,052 in Amazon's search results. (And those sales need to be sustained; a book's ranking drops awfully fast.)

Thus, if we want to sell, they tell us, we must mark our price down.

I'm here to tell you that doesn't work.

Authors have a lot of decisions to make once they're ready to publish. We have to choose just the right keywords and the right three categories. And why, by the way, doesn't Amazon expand its categories? Here are the three I chose:

• Kindle Books › Literature & Fiction › Women's Fiction › Contemporary ↗
• Kindle Books › Literature & Fiction › Genre Fiction › Coming of Age ↗
• Kindle Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary Fiction › American ↗

Those were the best out of a limited selection. We're told that Amazon also dumps a book into additional categories, and here's a free tool to find out where your book has been placed. When I entered my ASIN into the search bar, I was disappointed. I thought my novel might be in categories I was unaware of, but while it was, they're really worthless ones, like "Word Wise Enabled". What the hell is that? And "Kindle Unlimited Test" (?) 

Here's a couple of good ones: "c9ab0db0-ffd3-4141-aeea-b80d1da24569_9201" and "v3 Testing Node2".

 

 

Oh, boy! I don't know what those are, but I'm pretty sure they're where books go to die. (You won't be surprised to learn that my book's not a best seller in those categories, either.)

But I'm veering off topic. Anyway, there are a lot of decisions to make when publishing, and of course, one of the biggies is price. I was firmly against devaluing my work by sticking a bargain basement price to it, so I went with the indie norm of $4.99. Well, for most marketing, $4.99 just isn't going to fly. Shoppers are looking for bargains, dammit. I ran Facebook and Amazon ads with the novel's regular price--the ads were losers. Only when I decided to participate in one of the smaller promo sites' newsletters did I temporarily discount my book to $2.99. In fact, many of those promotion sites don't allow pricing over $2.99. Did my markdown work? LOL.

Not to be deterred, I tried Facebook and Amazon again, this time with the discounted price. Potential customers shrugged. Nope! they said--it's either free or nothing.

By all means, if you feel discounting will help, draw a big red X through your regular price and go for it. 

As for me, it's going to take far more convincing.