Kindle Daily Deal / Amazon
I’m tracking Kindle Daily Deal since the very beginning. I’m also watching Kindle Daily Deal in UK and Germany, as well as Nook Daily Find – B&N’s answer to ebook deals from Amazon.
It actually doesn’t take a lot of time to notice that those deals are about the attractiveness of the price, not the book.
An overwhelming majority of titles come from a midlist. Only few of the Kindle Daily Deal books were the real bestsellers. Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants was there to make a powerful introduction of Kindle Daily Deal and to raise readers’ expectations – which I doubt will ever be met.
There are two reasons why there are so few bestselling titles featured as ebook daily deals:
1. Publishers of bestselling books don’t need it
It’s obvious. If the book sells well, it doesn’t have to be discounted, even for one day. Full stop.
When the book is dug down in the middle of the list, then it’s a different story. Its author and publisher want more exposure. Being featured as a daily deal means a lot of exposure. I made a summary of KDD books in Top 100 in October. As much as 20 of them entered the list!
For a publisher and/or author it pays off to enter the daily deal only if the book doesn’t sell well in the first place.
2. Ebookstores don’t want it
The truth is that ebookstores don’t want highly attractive books as well. They don’t want the customers to buy a bestseller for $0.99 and leave.
Daily deals are intended to bring people to the store. They are teasers. If readers don’t know a lot about the book, they’ll start digging – and this is exactly what ebookstores want.
I was always wondering why Amazon doesn’t give a full information about the book on the official Kindle Daily Deal page. Or why they don’t offer a 1-Click Buy button. Or why they don’t offer RSS feed. Because they don’t really want users to jump and quit.
What they want is to turn customers into a shopping mood. And they want that mood return every single day.
Obviously, from time to time there will be bestsellers. As often as it’s needed to keep readers interested in daily deals – but as seldom as possible. Especially that the first reason comes back: publishers of bestselling titles don’t need daily deals. Therefore, ebookstores will most probably have to refund lost profits.
And the last thing ebookstores want is to pay for the featured book. What they want is to make the customer pay – and not only for the featured book.
(Via Ebook Friendly » Tips & More.)
I’ll add that the third party sites which collect these free/low cost titles from the major online distributors aren’t high quality at all. When I collected this list of sources to find good deals on ebooks, I kept finding these commercial sites which displayed lots of free or 99 cents titles, but most of them were promotional in nature: either the first in a series, a short fiction “preview” title or just bad writing in general.
I really try to stay on top of indie fiction, but I find that these “free” /”daily deal” titles are not really that at all; instead they are low-quality offerings from bigger publishers.
I’d much rather see a roundup of smashwords titles exported to Amazon. Sure, a lot of those titles are amateur or low-quality, but at least these kinds of ebooks feel less “packaged” to me and tit’s possible to find occasional gems. (I generally use Inkmesh to learn about and download smashwords titles, but it is a long and often tedious affair — and that’s even before I start reading them….To Amazon’s credit, their built in ebook previewer saves a lot of time when trying to decide whether to download something or not.
“It actually doesn’t take a lot of time to notice that those deals are about the attractiveness of the price, not the book.”
Actually it is about both the price AND the book. And you have to also consider that the exposure for mid-list or emerging authors is invaluable.
I’m a Kindle owner who checks the Daily Deal…well…daily. I visit to see what’s new, what’s different, who is writing who I is new to me. I don’t expect to find Stephen King or Michael Connelly books there.
Your price-not-book statement is not true, at least not in my case. When it comes to purchasing a book from the Daily Deal, it is the convergence of BOTH price and book that make my decision.
90% of the book descriptions on the Daily Deal do not appeal to me, and I won’t purchase them no matter the price. However, when a book sounds interesting and the price is right, then sure, I’ll give that author a look.
I recently purchased a 99 cent book, MORGUE DRAWER FOUR by Profijt Jutta. Was it NYTimes Bestseller material? No. But it was entertaining and different, (a murder mystery/comedy?), and I would be willing to spend more for another book by this author.
In this case, the book and the price were equal parts of my decision to purchase and the exposure won Mr. Jutta a new reader. Why is that wrong?