More Lessons about Pricing →

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Each business sement and separate product line has its lessons to teach about pricing. Pricing is crucial since it defines the value that your products are worth for your efforts and for your customers to buy them. A good starting place for pricing decisions comes from Cost-Based Pricing, Value-Based Pricing, and Competition-Based Pricing.

This article was prompted by some of the author’s recent experiences in the publishing business. There are obvious situations where considering the three guidelines of pricing, cost, value, and competition are the keys to finding the right price, and many influences lead to the decisions that need to be made.

Often, important decisions like pricing find that rather than the traditional guidelines for pricing decisions, loud voices from industry pundits promoting ideas supported by their personal opinions must be clarified, offering narrow and sometimes malicious advice and opinions. When I wrote this, I checked the definition of pundit and found it to be “an expert in a particular subject or field who is frequently called on to give opinions about it to the public.”

In the publishing business, authors make pricing decisions about the sales price of their books. This can be challenging enough in just trying to decide whether cost, value, or competition should be the influence on the decision, but an example of where a pundit has put a spin on the subject and just created confusion is worth looking at

Medium is an American online publishing platform, and in a recent article, a reader explained her hesitancy towards buying self-published books, which became a conversation about price points.

The reader explained that she hesitated to buy self-published books and said the reason was tied to seeking value and feeling that self-published books were generally priced too high. At the same time, she presented support for that claim by claiming that she had bought two recent books for $11.50 and compared that to a self-published book priced at $20.50. She added that the two books were from known authors and the expense, besides being self-published, was by an unknown author.

This is an example of how harmful generalizations happen. A simple consideration of cost, value, or competition does not require adding the factor of generalized assumptions about self-published or well-known authors.

The bigger problem is that using this generalization can lead to self-published and unknown authors concluding that they must be lower in price and ignoring their potential focus on content, value, and competition. Pricing for books and many products has a great deal to do with value, competition, and cost to produce. Customers will come back for products over and over that have valuable content but will disappear if disappointed, regardless of the method of publishing or the author’s name.

An important conclusion for any discussion about pricing is that there is a big difference between cost and value, and the price can be anywhere between the two.

The Gap Between, Writing, Promoting, and a Purchase →

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As someone who has written multiple books, I understand the frustration of putting in the effort to produce a book only to need help with getting it purchased. Where should a writer look to lay blame for slow sales results? The choices would be the content, promotional effort, or distribution point.

For many, Amazon was an obvious choice and primary focus for book sales distribution. However, for others, including myself, this choice has resulted in paying more than what is earned in sales for an extended period. This "gap" between effort and sales is worth pondering. An easy assumption is that the problem can be pricing, but the solution may lie in the book genre or content.

Positive reviews, feedback, and even some sales can be confusing when the gap between effort and results persists. Exploring other avenues for book sales, such as listing on KOBO, D2D, Apple Books, and B&N, can offer promise and access to new customers. However, there is still a learning curve in promoting and finding traction by adding additional distribution and marketing points or by going “wide” using multiple approaches to find sales.

Writing can be addictive, but as a marketer, it is frustrating to be addicted to efforts that yield little results. The gap between action and successful sales is a common struggle for writers, but those who overcome it can teach others and find success in their genre. On the other hand, it is often those that don’t overcome it that close their own gap by resorting to teaching others how to succeed

Do Better by Doing More Better Doesn't Work →

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More is not going to lead to better. What do you do when you want to do better and believe you have done better?

The answer often is in doing differently. When you do better, you are still changed to the same history and to the same way of thinking that got you to where you are and probably is the same as your competition is using in their review.

Does the question then become, what is different? You are different, so find out why you are and start there; in understanding others, understand why it is not the same.

Creating Revelant Email Lists

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Why are we told we have to have an email list if we want people to follow us? Is it so we can nag people into following and that our content isn’t enough? Since email lists are becoming more valuable is our creative content getting weaker?

Well, maybe this is because our content now faces increased competition in the ad space and even good content now is facing declining organic reach.

The other marketing channels are also becoming difficult to control which means an email list we control can be a great advantage.

Authors face the task of selling their own books more than ever before and so creating their own list focused on their readers is important.s. 

The lists are used to email readers about upcoming events, sales, new releases, and press release contacts that might actually publish the release.