While going through Amazon's section on Kindle Books, I read about their publishing program. Kindle editors allow you to set the genre on your novel, along with pricing before it's turned into an electronic download. Most of the novels in the top selling list sold for $3.99, allowing a royalty payment of a dollar and change to authors, which isn't bad if you sell a lot of novels.
Higher priced novels in the $9.99 price range didn't do well at all unless they were novels by Stephen King, Dan Brown and other top selling authors. So I had to advise a few of my close authors friends to forget the ego and to drop the higher prices of their novels. They did and sold more.
Actually, Kindle Books are selling well since so many novels can be loaded on at the same time. I also noticed that if a novel doesn't live up to the author's claims, returns on those novels are possible. Thus putting Kindle in line with most bookstores.
However, I noticed today that Amazon has dropped its prices on the Kindle Reader. In 2007, the original cost was $399.00, a charge that Amazon has been cutting prices on for a while now. Today it was announced in the Los Angeles Times that the readers have been cut another $40.00, bringing the overall cost to $259.00.
There are two ways of looking at these price cuts. 1) The Readers weren't selling too fast, so this hindered book sales. 2) Amazon realized the original price was beyond most wallets in today's ecomony and decided to rectify its error. Since the books were reportedly selling well, I don't know what to think about the price cut. However, it can only be a good thing for authors.
Ron
Mark