The Lowdown
with Laurie
Laurie Garrison
Free Books and
Cheap E-book
Pricing
With this being my last column for BTS, I wanted to share
my heart with the authors I love, to let them know how
much money they are losing by giveaways and by pricing
their e-books for so cheap.
Free and $0.99 books are everywhere, and it’s making
readers want only free or $0.99 books, and it’s time this
crazy pricing stops so you, the author, can start making
some money.
I walked in Books-A-Million the other day. I was looking
at all of the books priced over $0.99, and I wondered
how are places like this going to make it as authors keep
pricing box sets and novels for $0.99 or giving their books
away. Bookstores are closing daily, and you can blame it
on e-books all you want, but you, as an author, need to
take a look at your pricing before you lay all the blame on
e-books.
Let’s crunch some numbers, and give you some real food
for thought. Just a little over two years ago, there weren’t
mass amounts of free e-books on places like Amazon nor
were there so many giveaways out there. I had no other
choice: it was either buy the books I wanted to read or not
get to read them. As of right now, I have over 1,000 free
books on my Kindle; therefore, I have enough to last me
a lifetime. And I hear other readers saying this too, “Why
do I have to buy books when I can just get them for free?”
You know what? They are right. Why should we go buy
a book when we can go to Amazon and download more
than five daily for free? So, if I quit buying books because
I get them for free, you lose my $20 a week. That is
$1,040 a year, and if you add, let’s say, forty other readers
January 2014 | 11