I have two groups of friends. One group who believes you're not published unless it's with a traditional publisher. The other group of internet marketers who believes you can create a product and sell it yourself without a publisher. Essentially, self-publishing.
Unfortunately, the two groups do not agree on what's fair publishing practice when it comes to e-books. And I totally understand. Even knowing what I know now, it's difficult for me to think of charging $50 for an e-book that would have sold for $30 in print by a traditional publisher.
There are a few things that dictate what we charge in information marketing...
- The information: the niche and what value the information has to the buyer.
- The buying response: what price the market responds to.
The value is up to us as the authors and self-publishers. It's our responsibility to make sure the value is a benefit to the buyer - that the buyer gets more out of our product than he or she paid for it. I try to follow Yanik Silver's rule that we should make sure our product will give the buyer a 10, 100 or even 1000 times more return than what the buyer invested in it.
One thing I learned is that we do not have control over the buying response. For a long time, I rebelled against this. I insisted that we must sell our products for less, that to do so was the only responsible thing to do. But my training in internet marketing taught me differently.
You may believe you should sell the 50 page e-book for $10, but you need to understand the market you're selling that e-book to before you offer it at such a low price. In many markets, people just will not buy the product unless you charge $30-50. I know, I still have a hard time grasping this.
We do not control this. The market does. Or, should we say the ones who put out inferior $10 products do. They are the ones who taught the market that you get what you pay for. So, if you charge a lower price, they feel they are getting a lower quality product.
There is a way around this - and we responsible internet marketers have become creative in making sure we give our customers what they deserve. We have the power to tack on bonuses that boosts the value to the buyer, often we'll include a free month's membership to a site with it.
For instance, I offered at one time a 40 page e-book for $20. And I threw in four more extra e-books that helped the buyer with the topic. Now, I felt cheap still. Because four bonuses is low in the group I follow. Tacking on up to ten more bonuses would have been better. But I also rebelled and charged less for the e-book.
It did okay. It didn't do good or great for me because I didn't market it well. That was my fault - not the product. But I saw enough to know that the market would respond to it.
A few people in the traditional publishing group are complaining about an individual who put together a weight-loss e-book. This e-book sells for around $30 at the 60-page mark, with three bonuses.
I'm for and against this complaint.
As an internet marketer who understands how the marketing works on the web, I disagree. I feel there's a lot of bad feelings here because they do not understand what market this e-book is intended for. She could easily charge $10 for that e-book. But if she was to market it to venues like where I do, she'd never sell it. For the reasons stated above, it just doesn't work that way. People in the traditional publishing group just are not exposed to the ins and outs of internet information marketing, where this product belongs, and cannot understand this.
One misunderstanding is how she's telling people to do more of her type of marketing and they'll do better. Because her first week's sale was only one copy. On the internet, your sales may start off slow, or even dead, until you implement the marketing techniques. Then it builds up. This could happen quickly, overa period of days, or more slowly, over the span of a few years. It all depends on how much you know about qualifying and driving your traffic to your sales page.
The complaints also state that she's spent $7,000 in marketing. You can easily do that. Perhaps it's because her market is hot right now and her PPC expense is high. You have to pay a lot per click to get the top spot during the hot seasons. (I googled various words and didn't see an ad for her.) Either she's had massive traffic driven to her site by that investment and has made major money, or she didn't know what she was doing and wasted that amount - I haven't seen a gross income amount from her efforts.
My marketing budget in my fantasy realm where money is not an object for any one product will not come anywhere near that amount. Not even with PPC ads. Don't get me wrong, you CAN spend that much and come out very well. But the fact that she did, and then showed up personally marketing her book at a bookstore, left me with a "huh?" reaction.
Which leads to my approval of this complaint. Online information product marketing belongs online. Traditional publishing (and the physical self-publishing) belongs in the bookstores and the online bookstores. The two areas target two different buying types. They just do not mesh well. They live by different rules.
A traditional publisher is not going to be able to sell the e-book version of the book for a higher price. The information marketer is not going to be able to sell their info product for a lower price. It'll be interesting to see how this changes over the course of ten years, but for right now, this is just how it is.
I feel that an information marketer who is selling their e-book for the higher price to the appropriately targeted markets online, should stay in his or her place. They do not have the right to march into a bookstore and tell traditional writers how to do their business.
Likewise, I also feel that traditional writers should learn the facts fully before judging someone else. To be fair, this group feels that they know the facts. They don't realize there's another publishing world out there that's fully functional and well-loved. It surprised me to find out about it!
I'm still caught in the middle. I love both groups. I'm a member of both. I love writing the information products and the information product marketing. I love writing the traditional writing - fiction and non-fiction - and the prospect of gaining a presence there.
And the traditional side of me still rebels. Something I should sell for $30, I sell for $20. I give my affiliates at least 50%. I tack on bonuses and memberships to up the value. I study different business models, and combine them to create one that works for my target market and allows me to provide more for less.
Does it work? Not enough in yet to make that call. But I'm always thinking of new ways to do things, new offers to make. In time, I hope to have something that combines my two publishing sides together.
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