I’m currently running a sale of Magic After Midnight on Google Play and only Google Play. For the curious, here is why …
There is a Vendor That Shall Not Be Named that still accounts for about 65% of my book sales.
Lately, things have been going a little bonkers over there. Authors have reported accounts unexpectedly closed, help requests going unanswered, and books being randomly price-matched—and then stubbornly refusing to return to their normal prices.
That makes running a normal 99¢ sale everywhere surprisingly risky. If the Vendor That Shall Not Be Named price-matches the sale, I could wind up unable to get my book back to its regular price for weeks or even months.
There’s another problem: that vendor pays me only a 35% royalty on ebooks priced below $2.99. So getting stuck at 99¢ would be especially painful.
Enter Google Play Books.
Google lets me create digital coupons that discount a book without changing its actual list price. That means the coupon shouldn’t trigger price matching elsewhere. Better yet, Google Play pays me a 70% royalty even on these discounted sales.
This sale is available (almost) worldwide—I have a lot of international customers. I believe Barnes & Noble also offers discount codes, but they’re available only in the U.S.
Beyond price matching, there’s an even bigger reason I wanted to try this.
I don’t want all my eggs—or all my readers—in one basket.
If something ever happens to my account at the Vendor That Shall Not Be Named, I don’t want to suddenly lose access to 65% of my readers. I’d much rather know that some of you are already comfortable buying books elsewhere—and that you know an EPUB bought somewhere else can still wind up on your Kindle.
So this 99¢ sale is partly an experiment.
You get a discount. I get to experiment with a new way of running sales without risking a months-long price-matching mess. And, hopefully, a few more readers discover that the ebook world is much bigger than one store.
Everybody wins. Maybe even the Vendor That Shall Not Be Named—maybe enough migration from their platform might cause them to start fixing things under the hood.
But I am not holding my breath.