Friday, May 6, 2011

An Experiment With .99 Cent Kindle Book As a Launch Strategy

My latest Kindle book, Goal Setting for Sport: A Concise Guide for Coaches and Athletes was uploaded this morning. It is my hope it will appear on Amazon tomorrow. A post will appear on my website announcing the availability of the .99 version until June 1, 2011, at which time the price will go up to either $1.99 or $2.99. On Tuesday an e-mail will go out to the 1,700+ coaches on my e-mail list.  

The POD version has sold some copies and has already garnered three 5-star reviews. Hopefully Amazon will link the two versions as soon as the Kindle version is posted by Amazon.

I realize most authors who use the .99 price point are selling fiction but I am interested to see if this pricing strategy works for non-fiction as a launch so the book, both Kindle and POD versions, sell quickly enough to drive the title up in the Amazon Search Listings, causing the long tail effect to kick in much sooner.

I will compare my sales of this title against those of my best selling Kindle book in its first month and see if there was a noticeable difference in sales volume (not net profits) using this strategy as a launch for the Kindle book. In early June I will update the readers of this blog on this marketing strategy and report the results, good or bad, and what I have learned.

1 comment:

  1. I wish you luck on your Kindle sales. In my experience, the pricing issue is very "hit or miss." I've seen 99 cent pricing catapult a book into the bestseller list, and I've also seen it do nothing. The book still languished.

    I think that if the content is good, then 99 cents will get some buzz going. People are willing to give the book a try at that price, which is good.

    I think that Joe Konrath is right-- a lot of this business comes down to just plain old luck and good timing.

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