Free bestsellers
January 25th, 2010
"Here’s a riddle: How do you make your book a best seller on the Kindle?
Answer: Give copies away."
The New York Times has a very interesting article called With Kindle, the Best Sellers Don’t Need to Sell. Apparently Amazon has redefined "best-selling" to mean "most-downloaded". This is genius, for the exact reason that it may finally help publishers and authors understand a critical difference between selling physical books and selling digital books.
This difference is that in the physical world you can give away 5% of your product as a loss-leader to help sell the other 95%, but in the digital world the economics are flipped. Digital books cost nothing to manufacture or ship, and thus you can give away 95% as a loss-leader to make money on the remaining 5%. As the article states, this is the new way to make a best-seller.
For anyone wanting a more complete explanation of digital economics, I recommend reading Economist and Wired Editor Chris Anderson's new book Free. You can also read my review of Free.
However it appears that publishers are unfortunately not getting it yet:
“At a time when we are resisting the $9.99 price of e-books,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, the publisher of James Patterson and Stephenie Meyer, “it is illogical to give books away for free.”
Similarly, a spokesman for Penguin Group USA said: “Penguin has not and does not give away books for free. We feel that the value of the book is too important to do that.”
Answer: Give copies away."
The New York Times has a very interesting article called With Kindle, the Best Sellers Don’t Need to Sell. Apparently Amazon has redefined "best-selling" to mean "most-downloaded". This is genius, for the exact reason that it may finally help publishers and authors understand a critical difference between selling physical books and selling digital books.
This difference is that in the physical world you can give away 5% of your product as a loss-leader to help sell the other 95%, but in the digital world the economics are flipped. Digital books cost nothing to manufacture or ship, and thus you can give away 95% as a loss-leader to make money on the remaining 5%. As the article states, this is the new way to make a best-seller.
For anyone wanting a more complete explanation of digital economics, I recommend reading Economist and Wired Editor Chris Anderson's new book Free. You can also read my review of Free.
However it appears that publishers are unfortunately not getting it yet:
“At a time when we are resisting the $9.99 price of e-books,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, the publisher of James Patterson and Stephenie Meyer, “it is illogical to give books away for free.”
Similarly, a spokesman for Penguin Group USA said: “Penguin has not and does not give away books for free. We feel that the value of the book is too important to do that.”
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