Riding the Ebook Rollercoaster. Fun!

Change can be scary, and then again, sometimes it can feel like surfing down a big glorious wave. A few things that happened over the past few weeks convinced me of this.

GoNOMAD publishes a line of travel ebooks called Plane Readers. We started the project last April, and now we have five titles on Amazon, BN.com and Kobo in Canada. The price of the 278-page ebooks has always been $2.99, which has yielded pretty good sales.

But there is one title that outsells all of the rest, it’s the book about Italy. So we decided to raise the price last month to $4.99. Imagine being able to change the price of a hardcover book after you’ve had it in the bookstore The bookseller could do it. But the author could not.

We increased the price and sales stayed strong. WOW! We don’t want to go above $5 but at this point we were able to squeeze another 60% worth of revenue out of our most popular title. The result? We went from selling about 10 copies a day to just under 8. Worth it.

Later on I got a reality check when I my friend Ed told me he had asked his old friend, a military book writer if he had ever heard of ebooks. Nope. He had no idea what we were talking about. We have an idea about publishing one of his books as a future title, but first we’ll have to explain that in our version, the camouflage in the photos will be in color, not in black and white.