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All of this is well said. This bears mentioning, though: "For stable businesses it is perhaps a straightforward thing to name the price of a creation, but I imagine it would be hard for an author to come up with the price of her book." Pricing is an extraordinarily difficult problem in any business endeavor, be it publishing, software, semiconductors, or lightbulbs. Obviously it's easier in long-standing industries, or in quasi-monopolistic markets. But it's never straightforward or easy. Pricing is even harder in content businesses. First, because at least in the big-business side, so many parties have a finger in the pie, and need to be accounted for in the margin. Second, because there is no generally accepted consumer "spectrum" of price/length, price/format, price/category, price/perceived-value, etc. The guessing process is 50% science (SQL, Excel, R, benchmarks, etc.) and 50% art ("WTF will Segment A consider a decent price for Version X? Or Segment B for Version Y?") Of course, the other big constraint is rigidity. You can't really test, adjust, or offer promotional pricing on most publishing platforms or book markets. (And to whatever extent you can, you risk consumer backlash and confusion.) So whatever you decide right out of the gate, you're usually stuck with for awhile. A promising practice -- as the author of this blog post alludes to -- is to offer different prices (and sometimes, slightly different versions) to different audiences, who might come across the book at different touchpoints. One size does not fit all, and I suspect we'll see a lot more recognition of that fact in the book market in the coming years. |