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Thursday, December 13, 2012

Marketing 101 - Price Part 2


Another important decision in setting price is understanding market demand. There are four basic types of markets (e.g. perfect competition, monopolistic competition, oligopoly and monopoly). I won’t go over each type in detail. Suffice it to say that writing of any sort falls under monopolistic competition.

To qualify as monopolistic competition a good must have:

  1. Many buyers and sellers
  2. There are no barriers preventing sellers to enter or leave the market
  3. Each company makes a product that is different (even if only slightly different) than the competition.
  4. Differentiation can be based on quality, marketing and price

People tend to read genre novels quickly meaning there is a large demand for genre. And there tends to be a large supply to meet this demand.  The downside of having so much supply is that each supplier has a very limited amount of market power (e.g. the ability to set prices). This means selling an ebook for $20 for most authors is going to be impossible. But if you set the price too low? Well, we discuss that in that last post.

So how do you stand out if you’re new? Maybe consider “price bundles” (e.g add some fries to that shake). Perhaps, get together with other indie writers and come up with deals for purchasing multiple books. For example:

  • Buy my book and I’ll send you a few ebook from another writer
  • Buy my book and get a free companion guide
  • Buy my new book and get the first in the series free
  • Buy my book and get free screensavers, mp3 of book being read, etc.
  • Discount for promise of review
  • Discount for published authors

BOOKS BY M JOSEPH MURPHY:


Amazon: M Joseph Murphy on Amazon: Paperback and ebook
Smashwords: M Joseph Murphy Author Page on Smashwords
Kobo: M Joseph Murphy Books on Kobo

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