Digital Price point

Is this something we've had a go at here on SW? If not (and I can't remember if it's come up even tangentially related to other discussions about digital), here is Mark Waid talking about it at wondercon:

Comments

  • We may or may not have discussed it in one of the preceding forums. I don't remember it from here, though.

    Two years ago, when the pricing fight wasn't between comics publishers and comics retailers but between book publishers and Amazon, I tried to weigh in with a blog post from my own experience bewilderment. I guess it's half-way applicable if you replace MacMillan with, say, Marvel, $9.99 with $.99 or $1.99, and Amazon with - well, I don't think any ecomics retailer has been bullying their pricing policy the way Amazon did, so scratch that.

    Anyway, the problem seems to be that it's difficult to produce and market ebooks at the price that the market demands, for this reason or that, so it's hard to find a middle ground that could actually work for everybody. In comics' case, a lot of it seems to be about pleasing print retailers; marketing costs seem to be an issue, too. But the market is so used to that $.99 (or €.99) price point for smaller units of stuff by now that it's hard to go above that. (Personally, I'm with Waid on this one, though I don't really mind $1.99 books if they're worth it. They should be less than half the price, though, because that's a mental barrier for me.)
  • .99 is the sweet spot, I'll hesitate at 1.99 and I won't buy at all at 2.99

    Collections are different of course.

    The one weird thing I've noticed is if you focus more on the digital comic making like AVX Infinite, Luther, Power Play etc, you could actually do a "shorter" comic but make it seem longer overall.

    Infinite for instance is probably somethin like 12 pages or less in print but actually 65 pages in digital with the way it's constructed.
  • Sci Fi Author Charles Stross talks about something interesting (he's talking about prose here, but it could work for digital comics as well. Maybe)

    "Here's an example of the problem: books are sold as a reverse auction
    process (they get cheaper as time passes from the first publication
    date). I'd like to experiment with an ebook that makes this explicit: it
    launches at $20 then gets 5% cheaper every month until it hits $2.50.
    More: if you are willing to pay $10 but not $20, you can pay now, get
    the first 50%, and have the rest of the book emailed to you the instant
    it drops below the $10 price point. (Or pay the difference to "top up"
    to the current price -- e.g. you pay $10, then later when the book is
    selling for $16 you can pay another $6 to get the whole of it.)"
  • edited April 2012
    I had something "somewhat" similar in mind or rather, maybe the opposite...

    I started thinking about weekly consumption since I've seen that mentioned in numerous studies of how people read their digital comics. Somethin about how they only really read for 8-10 pages or 10 minutes, somethin to that effect.

    So I got thinkin about tryin somethin in that vein.

    Here's my suggested breakdown for it:

    Weekly - 12-16 pgs 99 cents.
    Then offer a Digital Issue - Two Weeklys in one, 22-32 pgs 1.99

    Although the first 2 weeklys would be free, since most Pubs give away the first issues for free anyway.

    But where I would change it up is to also offer a "full set deal" at Week 1 for say 5.99/6.99 which would give them the entire mini series. This of course would be their best deal. I would also offer other incentives like free swag, prints, behind the scenes or short stories to those customers in particular. The full deal would expire though and by getting the whole thing I'm not talking beforehand. They would get the series as it came out. But it would be pre-paid in essence.

    Although now after reading that AvX: Infinite Nova thing I may have to change my line of thinking altogether. Cuz I mean that thing would probably work out to a 12 pg print comic but yet it was 65 screen pages. So.... you could make it seem like a better deal but yet it could also take more effort in the art department to make that happen as well.

  • Love these ideas, keep 'em coming...

    Especially that Charles Stross idea.

    I've also been thinking about the kind of packaging that Adam mentioned. Pay the whole collection right away, get it with time. Or pay by the issue, but more. A kind of mini-crowdfunding, in a way.

    In Germany, we can't do much creative pricing, regrettably, since we're legally tied to our book prices. (Buchpreisbindung, it's called. It's a good thing because it makes niche books affordable and averts pricing wars, but it sucks when you try something new.)

    One idea I had was adding coupons to my pamphlet books to get around the pamphlet vs. trade thing - just collect the coupons and submit them with your trade order, and you'll get it cheap enough to not feel conned.
    Except, I can't do that 'cause it would put me into competiton with book sellers. I might revive that idea for a free extra book, though.

    Based on that idea, my last book came in three versions - the economy edition which was just the xeroxed comic, the business edition which had some extras and was printed with a color cover, and the asset edition which was a hardcover book with more pages of extras than comic. Readers could 'upgrade' from one version to the next by submitting a coupon - if they were okay with cutting up their books.
    Actually, this one was only barely legal - I kept the phrasing of everything very noncomittant and sold it exclusively from my site. (Also, nobody went for it. Guess they didn't like cutting up their books.)

    Now I'm already beginning to wonder how to make that Stross idea work. Maybe by waiving  the cover price at a given point. (Which would make it possible for every book retailer to compete with my prices, though.) Or by not releasing them as books at all, but as apps.
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