I’ve decided to experiment with pricing on my trade paperback editions and one experiment starts today. The affected books are The Jewels of Kinfairlie trilogy, The Rogues of Ravensmuir, The Bride Quest and my time travel romances.

All of these books are available in print-on-demand trade paperback editions from different portals. They’re also all backlist titles, so there are some mass market originals still available at some portals. The POD editions are direct-to-Amazon, or wholesale-from-Ingrams. It’s the Ingrams editions that are seeing the price change. (Some of my books have Nook print editions that publish directly to B&N and have similar pricing to the direct-to-Amazon editions, but not these titles.)

If we look at The Beauty Bride, the Amazon edition displays in the Amazon store. (Naturally!) It’s priced at $9.99 US. This is a good price for a trade paperback and it’s possible because there are no charges for distributing the book to other stores.

The trade paperback listed at Barnes & Noble is the Ingrams edition. In March, it was priced at $14.99 US and discounted to $13.49 US. Similarly, the print edition listed for sale at Indigo is the Ingrams edition – in March, it was $19.50 CA. The Ingrams list price on this book in March was $14.99 US and $19.99 CA.

Because Ingrams is a wholesaler, I (as publisher) can set the discount available to booksellers. This defines their cost and also affects the price of the book—the bigger the discount I offer, the higher my list price has to be to cover it. Bookstores tend not to order and stock titles without a high discount, but they haven’t been stocking these titles.

These titles sell much better at Amazon than at Ingrams, and my theory is that it’s because of the price.

So, it was time for an experiment. There’s nothing like a market test to figure out what works and what doesn’t. As of April 1, I changed the discount on these titles and the list prices. They’re all $9.99 US now and most are $14.99 CA. (The Ingrams prices perk out internationally, so they will be cheaper in all territories.)

I’m curious to see how this influences both distribution and sales of these titles. They still won’t be shelved in bookstores, but they weren’t anyway. If you’re interested in having any of them in print, though, and you don’t shop at Amazon, this is the time to order a copy!