I know you’re probably tired of my experimenting with pricing and want me to land on something already. We’re getting closer, and I want to add some transparency to my thought process here.

The average ebook on Amazon is 50,000 words and priced between $2.99 and $3.99. A lot of ebook authors swear their work sells best at $2.99. This is a better apples-to-apples comparison than PDFs on DriveThruRPG because there are generally fewer people and lower production costs for general fiction or non-fiction than for a roleplaying manual.

Another reason for those price points is the nature of roleplaying material. It’s reusable. If you divide any core book, one of mine or the D&D PHB or anything, by the number of players in the group and again by the number of sessions of play, it gets cheaper with use. You tend to only read a book, fiction, or non-fiction, once.

The third reason for the $3 to $5 range is to be able to put things on sale. Getting only the front page of DriveThruRPG as a bestseller is now virtually impossible, as I wrote about in issue 4 of Dice & Discontent. I can run a sale and get into the sale page, but that means either matching or undercutting bundle prices, which hurts bundle sales, or undercutting prices on Lightspress.com. Because I’m trying to drive sales to the site, I don’t want to do that.

So, I’m going to keep prices as they are on DriveThru -- $5 for core books, $3 for sourcebooks, allowing for my own interpretation of those terms. New releases on Lightspress.com are going to be $2.99 each going forward, regardless of what type of book it is. If this tactic works, I’ll circle back and start dropping the prices on backlist titles in the Lightspress shop.

I hope you’re doing well today.

Berin